Attitudes to Qualitative Archiving in Ireland: Findings from a Consultation with the Irish Social Science Community.

Although there is no specifi c requirement to archive social science data in Ireland, interest in and the practice of data archiving has been growing signifi cantly in recent years. This growth is somewhat facilitated by the establishment of the Irish Qualitative Data Archive (IQDA) in 2008. Between 2009 and 2010, the IQDA consulted with social science researchers from leading academic institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland for their opinions on archiving qualitative research and contextual data. Interview fi ndings indicate that, while researchers recognised many of the benefi ts of archiving, their concerns centre primarily around two areas; namely legal and ethical concerns with archiving, and epistemological concerns, thus refl ecting the dominant debates about archiving in the literature as identifi ed by Heaton (2008). The paper concludes by presenting some of the solutions that have been implemented by IQDA, which have since been incorporated into our cornerstone document, Best Practice in Archiving Qualitative Data (2010)