The SOCEY team of Julie McLeod, Kate O’Connor and Nicole Davis, along with ten partner organisations from across the government, non-government and higher education sectors, is part of a new project. CADRE (Coordinated Access for Data, Research and Environments): A Five Safes Implementation Framework for Sensitive Data in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in Australia.
The project will result in the development of a shared and distributed sensitive data management platform (CADRE) to improve Australian researcher access to sensitive data by operationalising the Five Safes framework. Common accreditation and information exchange protocols will enable data owners and users to address core concerns around governance, creation, management and sharing of sensitive data for research. The platform will also provide a space to share and move sensitive data safely between higher education, national research and government facilities and services.
The SOCEY team contributes expertise to the project in several ways, with particular focus on the requirements and implications of the CADRE platform for the storage, use and reuse of qualitative (as opposed to quantitative data). The team’s specific interest is in the studies of childhood, education and youth, particularly within the fields of sociology, education and history but its work will have relevance to qualitative data across broader fields.
Some of SOCEY’s deliverables include reports on the governance of qualitative data across sectors and the implications of the CADRE platform for qualitative data; developing a framework for the CADRE platform, built around the Five Safes model; using case studies and focus groups to contribute to these.
Through the second half of the year, we worked on a number of tools used for software development, which will contribute towards the CADRE Framework and the technical side of the project. These were a series of Use Cases, User Stories, and User Personas that explored the types of qualitative researchers who might use a platform such as CADRE and the reasons behind their desired usage.
They also examined the broader scope of requirements that qualitative researchers might have for the storage, sharing and reuse of their data: from project design to research data management to depositing and storage of data to allowing others to access this data in the future, and the requirements that they would have from both a CADRE-type platform, as well as digital repositories more generally.
Currently we are working hard on assisting with the writing of the framework and drafting a preliminary report on the governance of qualitative data across government, academic and GLAMR (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, records) sectors. Once the latter is complete, we will be sending this initial report around for comments.
