Making Others’ Data Your Own: Adding Value & Promoting Interoperability through Secondary Data Use

When using publicly available data sources to conduct research, it’s tempting to go straight to the source – to obtain the data directly from the source or agency that creates it. But starting from the source can lead to missed opportunities for saving time, aligning approaches with other researchers, and fostering interoperability across research domains. In this panel discussion, we’ll hear from three researchers who have all used publicly available data from a variety of sources to build their own data resources, then made those data resources available through ICPSR. Examples include:

• the U.S. COVID-19 County Policy Database (UCCP), a collection of data on state and local COVID-19 related policies compiled from government data sources;
• the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA), a collection of contextual measures theoretically derived, spatially referenced, nationwide measures of the physical and social environment created in part from publicly available data sources such as census data; and
• the Occupational Social Distancing Indices, a set of summary measures derived from publicly available Occupational Information Network (O*NET) data for characterizing jobs by their work-from-home capacity.

In this session, we’ll hear from the creators to discuss the data resources they created, why the researchers decided to create them, and what users stand to gain from using these resources over the originals.