Using Archived Interviews in a Methodological Secondary Analysis Project: Reflections on Archiving Qualitative Research Data

Abstract

The creation of archives to preserve and share qualitative research data has been accompanied by intense conceptual debates and methodological questions among scholars. Although the success of archiving data can finally be measured by the practices of data sharing and secondary use, the actual practices and experiences of working with this kind of data have been neglected in discussions. Thus, we utilize our experiences in a methodological research project on qualitative interviews to reflect on organizational, methodological and epistemic aspects of archiving qualitative data. By presenting processes of how we found and reviewed archived interview transcripts in our project, we illustrate how the production of data fit in secondary analysis is performed within a communicative triad of primary researchers, secondary researchers, and archivists.