Archives
Archiving data provides many benefits to individual researchers as well as to the scientific community. Archiving your study preserves the data beyond the life of your project while ensuring the protection of confidentiality pledges to study participants. Making your data available for secondary analyses reinforces open scientific inquiry and encourages analytic and methodological diversity. Specifically:
  • Data may be reanalyzed to explore questions other than those of interest and collaborators, thus promoting new research and making better use of the data.
  • Study may be used as baseline data for replication studies.
  • Study may be used in conjunction with other studies of similar design to create a more diverse sample or to provide a historical perspective on a given phenomenon.
  • Study may be a candidate for a follow- up study, in which the sample is re contacted by another researcher, thus creating a longitudinal study out of a cross-sectional one or adding more waves to an existing longitudinal study.
  • Study may facilitate exploratory research, allowing a researcher to refine research questions, to assess the best means for addressing those questions, and to develop new research instruments or coding schemes.

Off site archiving
DSS sites collect huge volume of data over several years. However, DSS sites have limited space to allow for several years of data archiving on-site. In such a case, consideration for off-site archiving may be considered. In some countries where DSS sites are located there are commercial companies that specialize in information archiving and DSS sites may consider to contract such companies for long term data archiving. Normally charges for off-site archiving are specified for each form. Additional charges are levied for retrieval and transportation of the forms between the DSS site and the off- site storage. It is therefore advisable to place into off-site archive only those data forms no longer required for any data reconciliation or cleaning purposes, in order to minimize retrieval and transportation costs. Another important consideration is acquaintance with the archiving standard operating procedures of off- site archiving company.
See also Off-site electronic archiving in Section 5.
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