Whose data? ‘Stealing’ from the poor

There is growing evidence that researchers and their agencies ‘capture’ poverty data sets for years on end, without making them publicly available. While hanging on to data sets may enhance their reputations and help ‘fast-stream’ their careers, what long-term effect does this have on research into chronic poverty and ultimately, the poor themselves?

Quantitative panel data sets are produced by repeated questionnaire surveys of the same households. They can be used to analyse changes and patterns in household poverty in great detail. However, they are rare as they are demanding in terms of both money and management. While there is a pressing need to encourage the building of new data sets, it is also clear that much better use could be made of existing data sets if they were available to larger numbers of researchers more quickly.

Those who gain from keeping the data sets out of the public arena are based mainly in universities and research institutes in Europe and the USA and organisations headquartered in Washington, DC. The people who effectively ‘lose out’ are based mainly in the south – both researchers and the poor themselves.

The practice of keeping data sets out of public view is harmful in at least five ways:

* It weakens the scientific base of development research. ‘Hard science’ demands that results are replicated by other researchers to confirm findings.

* Such data sets are almost always collected with the aid of public funds but they are converted into private property by elite researchers.

* It is anti-development: reducing public access to such data sets slows down the advancement of useful knowledge.

* The main ‘input’ in such data sets is the unpaid time of poor people – all the other stakeholders (interviewers, researchers and aid agency staff) are on a salary.

* When other researchers eventually get access to the data set (which could be many years later) their use of the data may have little relevance to policy because of the time that has lapsed.

What should be done?

* Research funders should set dates for the publication of data sets. It is not unreasonable for researchers to have a period of ‘first go’ analysis, but this should be made clear in the research design and should not be more than 12 months.

* Researchers should follow ethical codes and monitor each other in this respect.

* Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy groups should ‘name and shame’ researchers and agencies who delay data from entering the public domain.

Source(s):
Full document: The Programme for Research on Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh’s (PRCPB) website http://www.prcpb-bids.org/
'Escaping poverty: Can policy reach the chronically poor?' Insights #46 http://www.id21.org/insights/insights46/index.html

Date: 3 March 2003

Further Information:
David Hulme
Chronic Poverty Research Centre
Institute for Development Policy and Management
University of Manchester
Crawford House
Oxford Road
Manchester, M13 9GH, UK

Tel: +44 (0)161 275 2825
Fax: +44 (0)161 273 8829
Email: David.hulme@man.ac.uk

Chronic Poverty Research Centre, IDPM, UK http://www.chronicpoverty.org

Other related links:

See id21's links page on Chronic Poverty http://www.id21.org/insights/insights46/insights-iss46-sse.html