I’m thinking about data again – mostly because I am still in the process of collecting/gathering/generating it for my postdoctoral research. I had a conversation with a colleague at a conference I went to recently who talks about ‘generating’ his data – colleagues of mine in my PhD group use this term too – but the default term I use when I am not thinking about it is still ‘collecting’ data. I’m sure this is true for many PhD scholars and even established researchers. I don’t think this is a simple issue of synonyms. I think the term we use can also indicate a stance towards our research, and how we understand our ethical roles as researchers.

Collect (as other PhD bloggers and methods scholars have said) implies a kind of linear, value-free (or at least value-light) approach to data. The data is out there – you just need to go and find it and collect it up. Then you can analyse it and tell your readers what it all means. Collect doesn’t really capture adequately, for me, the ethical dilemmas that can arise, large and small, when you are working in the ‘field’. And one has to ask: is the data just there to be collected up? Does the data pre-exist the study we have framed, the questions we are asking, and the conceptual and analytical lenses we are peering through? I don’t think it does. Scientists in labs don’t just ‘collect’ pre-existing data – experiments often create data. In the social sciences I think the process looks quite different – we don’t have a lab and test tubes etc – but even if we are observing teaching or reading documents, we are not collecting – we are creating. Gathering seems like a less deterministic type of word than collecting, but it has, for me, the same implications. I used this word in my dissertation, and if I could go back I would change it now, having thought some more about all of this.

Generating seems like a better word to use. It implies ‘making’ and ‘creating’ the data – not out of nothing, though; it can carry within it the notions of agency of the researcher as well as the research participants,  and notions of the kinds of values, gazes, lenses, and interests that the parties to the research bring to bear on the process. When we generate data we do so with a particular sense in mind of what we might want to find or see. We have a question we are asking and need to try and answer as fully as possible, and we have already (most of the time) developed a theoretical or conceptual gaze or framework through we we are looking at the data and the study as a whole. We bring particular interests to bear, too. If, as in my study, you are doing research in your own university, with people who are also your colleagues in other parts of your and their working life, there are very particular interests and concerns involved that impact not just on what data you decide to generate, but also how you look at it and write about it later on. You don’t want to offend these colleagues, or uncover issues that might make them look bad or make them uncomfortable. BUT, you also have a responsibility, ethically, to protect not just yourself but also the research you are doing. Uncomfortable data can also be very important data to talk about – it can push and stretch us in our learning and growth even as it discomforts us. But this is not an easy issue, and it has to be thought about carefully when we decide what to look at, how and why.

These kinds of considerations, as one example, definitely influence a researcher’s approach to generating, reading and analysing their data, and it can help to have a term for this part of the research process that captures at least some of the complexity of doing empirical work. For now, I am going to go with others on this and use ‘generating’. Collecting and gathering are too ‘thin’ and capture very little if any of the values, interests, gazes and so forth that researchers and research participants can bring to bear on a study. Making and creating – well, these are synonyms for generating, but at the moment my thinking is that they make it sound too much like we are pulling the data out of nothing, and this is not the case either. The data is not there to be gathered up, nor is it completely absent prior to us doing the research. In generating data, we look at different sources – people, documents, situations – but we bring to bear our own vested interests, values, aims, questions, frameworks and gazes in order to make of what we see something different and hopefully a bit new. We exercise our agency as researchers, not just alone, but in relation to our data as well. Being aware of this, and making this a conscious rather than mechanical or instrumental ‘collection’ process can have a marked impact, for the better I think, on how ethically and responsibly we generate data, analyse it and write about down the line.