Data Management on the Front Lines: Managing Administrative Data at the Source
Channel: csvconf
Date: 2023-05-31

Presented by: Kelsey Badger

Over the past decade, it has become increasingly common that funders require researchers to submit a data management plan detailing how data produced during the project will be documented, secured, and shared. However, there is no equivalent requirement for managing government data that is “born-administrative”, even if it is commonly used downstream for research purposes. This has resulted in an uneven patchwork of government data management practices that greatly impact the accessibility and usability of administrative data for both its original purposes and in any subsequent re-use. This talk will explore this challenge through the example of child welfare electronic case records in the United States. This data is a particularly complex case study due to both its sensitivity and the distributed nature of the child welfare service system, which relies heavily on privatized contractors. This creates a correspondingly long tail of data management needs that are often not addressed by top-down data governance policies. How can data management practices be incorporated earlier in child welfare data collection without further burdening overworked frontline staff? Are there lessons to be learned from the last decade of teaching researchers how to better manage their data? And whose responsibility is all this anyway?