Respond, Recover, Reset: Exploring the Voluntary Sector’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

We endeavoured to retain the richness and meaning of these transcripts while making it accessible for future use

- Sarah Smith, Daniel King, Juliana Mainard-Sardon, David Dahill, Ben Evans

Tell us a bit about you and your research.

We are a team of researchers for the Centre for People, Work and Organisational Practice, which conducts research on human resource management, innovation, and performance to address business and policy imperatives through the effective formulation and deployment of human and knowledge capital. During the COVID-19 pandemic we conducted an 18-month study into the effects of the pandemic on the voluntary sector. This project considered how we share qualitative data, whilst ensuring our ethical and legal obligations, and the learning we gained from making our data open to other researchers

Tell us about a project you were involved in which used Open Research practices and principles?

During the early stages of the pandemic there was significant concern that the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector was facing both increased demand for its services, whilst simultaneously facing funding cuts estimated at £4.3bn. This ESRC funded project aimed to discover how the sector was responding and provide real-time and accessible data for policymakers and practices to help them understand what was happening and respond to these challenges.

A key innovation was the bringing together of three data collection strategies, a monthly barometer, quarterly panel survey and over 300 in depth interviews, to capture what was happening in the sector and feed these insights to decision-makers.

It did this through accessible and digestible monthly reports, an interactive dashboard – to allow users to drill into the data (while supporting anonymisation) and presentations to policymakers, including government ministers. It was co-designed with our sector partner the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

Describe the open research practice(s) employed in your study. Why did you select them?

Open research was a central principle from the outset of the project because we wanted our research to be used by other researchers in the future. This required us to think carefully about how to build open research principles into the research design, including:

Ethics: Participants were informed through the participant information sheet that, with their consent, the data they provided would be made available to other researchers. When they signed our consent form, they were given an opt-in choice for their data to be used in this way.

Transcribing: All interviews were transcribed with the same format, thereby making the process of uploading interviews to UKRI smoother. This also means that when interviews are reused by other researchers, comparisons can be made more easily across the data set.

Collecting demographic information: This allowed us to build a spreadsheet giving an overview of the types of organisations in each interview. This gives researchers reusing this data some background context to the organisations interviewed and helps to navigate the data set, particularly given its size.

Project documentation: Including developing a spreadsheet to track interviews, meaning we were able to clearly see which participants had agreed for their data to be ‘open’.

Did you face any challenges in the project, and how did you overcome them?

The key challenge was working with the project’s qualitative data, due to a combination of this data’s scale, and disclosive nature. During the interviews participants discuss sometimes highly personal issues around personal loss and challenging organisational decisions. We endeavoured to retain the richness and meaning of these transcripts while making it accessible for future use. The scale of our project, with over 300 qualitative interviews, required efficient and replicable processing.

We chose a sample to explore if removing primary indicators like names ensured anonymity. We found that job titles, initiatives, or unique organisations still identified individuals. This raised concerns about what to remove while maintaining data integrity. Removing all disclosive information led to loss of meaning. After discussions with the team, Jane Bonnell, and UK Data Service, we decided to upload the data with controlled access, allowing only credible researchers to access it. Additionally, requests for data must go through the lead investigator on the project. In this way, we applied the principle ‘open as possible, closed as necessary’.

What has been the impact of adopting open research practice(s) in your project?

The learning from developing the open data process on this project has gone on to inform and change the way we work, developing new working practices to build open data practices into further projects at each stage of the process on from preparing bids, gaining ethical approval and designing the research.  We have had internal discussions as part of the team, developing our insights and knowledge.  As a result of this we have gained follow on funding. Additionally, our learning has given us the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across the university and in other universities . We are currently working on developing informal communities of best practice using the learning we have gained through this project to support other researchers within the Centre for People, Work and Organisational Practice to build open data practices into their research.

What did you learn from making this project ‘open’? Do you have any advice for others considering adopting open research practices?

Our key learning has been that navigating challenges is possible, even with a large qualitative data set. For others considering being more open with their research we would say thinking about this from the early stages of the project significantly helps to counter any issues when it comes to making the research open.  Having a clear plan in place for what you want to achieve and how open you want to make your data, or parts of your data, is important as it saves retrospectively having to do work. Talking to funders about their expectations for open research within the projects they fund as many have clear guidelines in place which can help to support building this into the project at an early stage. Finally, the Academic Engagement Team: Open Research based in NTU Library are vastly knowledgeable and a fantastic source of support at every stage of the process.

Centre for People, Work and Organisational Practice

Sarah Smith (Research Fellow, Nottingham Business School); Daniel King (Professor, Nottingham Business School); Juliana Mainard-Sardon (Research Fellow, Nottingham Business School); David Dahill (Research Fellow, Nottingham Business School); Ben Evans (Research Fellow, Nottingham Business School)