Presentation on Irish Qualitative Data collections, delivered by Jane Gray as part of the DRI webinar 'Using Digital Archives for Social Sciences Research', which took place on 20 April 2021.

1. Life histories and biographies
Jane Gray
Using digital archives for social sciences
research, DRI, 20th April 2021

2. maynoothuniversity.ie
Irish Qualitative Data Archive
• Founding member of the Digital
Repository of Ireland
• Frames the parameters and standards for
archiving qualitative data within the Irish
research community
• Based in Maynooth University
• Eighteen collections in DRI – talking today
about two on which I was a (Co) PI
– LHSC: Life histories and social
change
– RESCuE: Citizens’ resilience in
times of crisis

3. maynoothuniversity.ie
Life histories and social
change (2005-2008)*
100 guided life story interviews
Three birth cohorts
• A (before 1935)
• B (1945-54)
• C (1965-74)
Link to Living in Ireland panel survey
(1994-2001) facilitates ‘situated
analysis’
Some open data available
*Funded by Irish Research Council for the Humanities
and Social Sciences

4. maynoothuniversity.ie
RESCuE: Citizens’ resilience in times of
crisis (2014)*
Part of cross-national European project on
household responses to the 2008 financial crisis
‘Household’ narrative interviews (rural and
urban) in Midlands study area
‘Photo-elicitation’ interviews with a subset of
participants
‘Reflexive lifeline’ instrument to facilitate
‘situated’ biographical analysis
DRI collection includes:
• 25 household interviews
• 15 photo-elicitation interviews
• 16 reflexive lifelines
• 128 participant contributed photographs
*Funded by the European Commission under FP7,
GA 613245

5. maynoothuniversity.ie
Ideas for using archived social
science data*
• Re-visiting data
– Re-visiting ‘old’ data
– Comparing ‘old’ and ‘new’ data
• Working across datasets
– Extending scope and range of contiguous data
– Bringing diverse data into analytic
conversation (translation and casing)
– Pooling cross-project data in new ways
* See chapters by Neale and Irwin in Hughes and Tarrant (2020)

6. maynoothuniversity.ie
Useful references
• Gray, J. and Dagg, J. (2019) ‘Using reflexive lifelines in
biographical interviews to aid the collection,
visualisation and analysis of resilience,’ Contemporary
Social Science, 14:3-4, 407-422
• Geraghty, R. and Gray, J. (2017) ‘Family Rhythms: Re-
visioning family change in Ireland using qualitative
archived data from Growing Up in Ireland and Life
Histories and Social Change’, Irish Journal of Sociology,
25(2), pp. 207–213.
• Hughes, K. and Tarrant, A. (2020) Qualitative Secondary
analysis. London: Sage