Should Scholars Own Data? David Grusky About the American Voices Project

If qualitative work were to be rebuilt around open science principles of transparency and reproducibility, what types of institutional reforms are needed? It’s not enough to mimic open science movemen

Welcome to this seminar with David Grusky, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.The seminar is jointly organized by the Institute for Analytical Sociology and the Institute for Futures Studies.D Thursday, October 6 13:00-15:00 (CET) At the Institute for Futures Studies (Holländargatan 13, Stockholm), or onlineIf qualitative work were to be rebuilt around open science principles of transparency and reproducibility, what types of institutional reforms are needed? It’s not enough to mimic open science movements within the quantitative field by focusing on problems of data archiving and reanalysis. The more fundamental problem is a legal-institutional one: The field has cut off the development of transparent, reproducible, and cumulative qualitative research by betting on a legal-institutional model in which qualitative scholars are incentivized to collect data by giving them ownership rights over them. This neoliberal model of privatized qualitative research has cut off the development of public-use data sets of the sort that have long been available for quantitative data. If a public-use form of qualitative research were supported, it would not only make qualitative research more open (i.e., transparent, reproducible, cumulative) but would also expand its reach by supporting new uses. The American Voices Project – the first nationally-representative open qualitative data set in the US – is a radical test of this hypothesis. It is currently being used to validate (or challenge!) some of the most famous findings coming out of conventional “closed” qualitative research, to serve as an “early warning system” to detect new crises and developments in the U.S., to build new approaches to taking on poverty, the racial wealth gap, and other inequities, and to monitor public opinion in ways far more revealing than conventional forced-choice surveys. The purpose of this talk is to discuss the promise – and pitfalls – of this new open-science form of qualitative research as well as opportunities to institutionalize it across the world. 

The first draft of the report of the International Panel of Social Progress (IPSP), "Rethinking Society for the 21st Century", is out now! We welcome you to comment on the online platform  https://comme

Nordic Council of Ministers, 54 pages Women have generally been treated as “side shows” in the literature on war,terrorism and violent extremism and have thus been given scant scholarly attention.In mato be framed as unwitting, passive agents or brainwashed victims pulled into violentextremist movements only through the relations of their husbands, boyfriends, orfathers.

The staff of the Institute for Futures Studies is deeply saddened to learn that our friend and colleague Geoffrey Brennan has recently passed away. Geoff was a most distinguished scholar and a very val

AI & Society Abstract Machine learning algorithms (ML) are increasingly used to support decision-making in the exercise of public authority. Here, we argue that an important consideration has been o

Completed: The power over expert reports – contents, origins and consequences

This project examines how the reports and investigations ordered to address the organizational problems in health care are actually used.

The basic income proposal has received increasing attention in the past few years. Several ambitious basic income experiments are currently being planned in different parts of the world and the very f

The Institute for Futures Studies is looking for a postdoc to be part of a research project on valuing future lives. The applicant needs to hold a PhD degree on a relevant philosophical topic when the (Philosophy).

The purpose of the project is to stimulate and discuss knowledge-based text production alongside the dominant academic formats, to contribute to more animated writing and readable texts by scholars, and thereby enlarge their audience.