Pilot Projects

As part of QDR’s initial development, the repository commissioned 21 pilot projects of various types. The scholars who produced these pilots hailed from all ranks and subfields of the discipline and worked at institutions across the United States. While all the pilot projects were based on rigorous empirical work, their content was as varied as the scholars who produced them.

The pilot projects were vital in advancing two of QDR’s critical goals. The lack of a qualitative data sharing tradition in the United States meant that scholars at large were unsure what procedures and products were implied by evolving norms of data sharing and research transparency. The pilots provided some initial lessons on what sharing qualitative data entails, what types of data can be shared, and in what formats.

Further, the pilots illustrated how sharing qualitative data – with careful attention to human subjects and copyright concerns that may attend those data – can facilitate secondary analysis, allow qualitative scholarship to be more easily understood and evaluated, and enhance teaching.

The table below notes what type of project each pilot is – a data collection (DC), topic cluster (TC), active citation compilation (ACC), or pedagogical data collection (PDC) – and offers some basic information for each. Clicking on the “Title of Project” takes users to a brief description summarizing the research underlying the pilot project (where applicable) and describing the data and their availability.  For pilot projects that are complete, the project description includes a link to the project.