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Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2021

Emily Hauptmann Open the ORCID record for Emily Hauptmann [Opens in a new window]
Emily Hauptmann*
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Western Michigan University E-mail: emily.hauptmann@wmich.edu
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Argument

Most social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves.

Keywords

Data sharingUniversity of MichiganInstitute for Social Research (ISR)Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)Angus CampbellWarren Millersocial science historypolitical science
Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 33 , Issue 2: Power, Politics, and the Development of Political Science in the Americas , June 2020 , pp. 101 - 119
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

References

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

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Solovey, Mark. 2013. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amadae, S.M. (Sonja) 2003. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Austin, Erik. 2011. “ICPSR: The Founding and Early Years.” Accessible at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/about/history/early-years.html (accessed November 14, 2020).Google Scholar
Bisco, Ralph L. 1966. “Social Science Data Archives: A Review of Developments.” American Political Science Review 60:93–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bisco, Ralph L. 1967. “Social Science Data Archives: Progress and Prospects.” Social Science Information 6 (1):39–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Nancy. 2006. “The Michigan, then National, then American National Election Studies.” Accessible at https://cps.isr.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ANES_history.pdf (accessed November 14, 2020).Google Scholar
Camic, Charles, Gross, Neil, and Lamont, Michèle, eds. 2011. Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Converse, Jean. 1987. Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890-1960. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Crowther-Heyck, Hunter. 2006. “Patrons of the Revolution: Ideals and Institutions in Postwar Behavioral Science.” Isis 97:420–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ford, Clellan S. 1970. Human Relations Area Files, 1949-1969: A Twenty-Year Report. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, Inc. Accessible at https://hraf.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/HRAF-1949-1969.pdf (accessed November 14, 2020).Google Scholar
Frantilla, Anne. 1998. Social Science in the Public Interest: A Fiftieth-Year History of the Institute for Social Research. Ann Arbor: Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Gieryn, Thomas. 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hauptmann, Emily. 2016. “‘Propagandists for the Behavioral Sciences’: The Overlooked Partnership between the Carnegie Corporation and SSRC in the Mid-Twentieth Century.” The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 52 (2): 167–187.Google Scholar
Hauptmann, Emily. 2017. “Competition and Coordination in the 1960s U.S. Data Center Boom.” Paper presented at the International Political Science Association Conference, “Political Science in the Digital Age.” Hannover, Germany (December). Unpublished manuscript. Available from the author by request.Google Scholar
House, James S. et al., eds. 2004. A Telescope on Society: Survey Research and Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ICPR Annual Reports, 1962-1969. Accessible at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/about/annual-reports/index.html (accessed November 14, 2020).Google Scholar
Isaac, Joel. 2012. “Epistemic Design: Theory and Data in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations.” In Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, edited by Solovey, Mark and Cravens, Hamilton, 79–95. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, John E. and Saxonhouse, Arlene W.. 2014. “Not Your Great-Grandfather’s Department.” Unpublished manuscript. Available from the authors upon request.Google Scholar
King, Gary. 1995a. “Replication, Replication.” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (3):444–52.Google Scholar
King, Gary. 1995b. “A Revised Proposal, Proposal.” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (3):494–499.Google Scholar
Kraus, Rebecca S. 2011. “Statistical Déjà Vu: The National Data Center Proposal of 1965 and its Descendants.” Paper presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings, Miami Beach, FL., August 1. Accessible at https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/kraus-natdatacenter.pdf (accessed November 15, 2020).Google Scholar
Lemov, Rebecca. 2015. Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lucci, York, and Stein, Rokkan, with Meyerhoff, Eric. 1957. A Library Center of Survey Research Data: A Report of an Inquiry and a Proposal. New York: Columbia University School of Library Service.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1973. “The Normative Structure of Science.” In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited and with an introduction by Storer, Norman W., 267–280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Warren. 1988. Oral history interview. (Heinz Eulau, interviewer). In Political Science in America: Oral Histories of a Discipline, edited by Baer, Michael, Jewell, Malcolm, and Sigelman, Lee, 231–247. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Orcutt, Guy. 1957. “The Importance of Sample Survey Statistics for Economic Research.” Michigan Business Review 9 (1):5–9.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Ilia. 1999. “Journalism, Development, and the Reworking of Modernity: News Reporting and the Construction of Local Narratives of Modernization in Puerto Rico during Operation Bootstrap (1947-1963).” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Rohde, Joy. 2013. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Scheuch, Erwin K. 2003. “History and Visions in the Development of Data Services for the Social Sciences.” International Social Science Journal 177: 385–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solovey, Mark. 2013. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar