Cameron Brick on using the diverse range of openly available psychological data, including from the UK Data Service.
Why collate?
I have been frustrated for years that psychologists south korea rcs data are not using large, existing, free data to its potential. The problem is we don’t know what exists, what it contains, or how to use it without a huge investment. In both teaching and research, social scientists mostly collect new datasets that are often unsatisfactory in measure quality, sample size or population.
Most researchers are dimly aware that there are larger-scale, high-quality open datasets available for secondary analysis. I firmly believe that these datasets can be useful both in research and in teaching undergraduates and postgraduates key analytical skills on high-quality data relevant to their interests and courses.
A key problem is that the data are hosted on a range of complex platforms and a lot of time is needed just to find out which datasets exist and what themes they cover. As this was a barrier to me after years of being a professor, it is likely also a barrier to other social scientists.