Do I need to keep these?

[stuckinthehouse]

Having a clear-out at home and I've found some CD ROMS containing the raw interview data from my Masters dissertation (interviews with pupils). Is there any reason why I would need to keep these or can I chuck them?

Do you have the transcripts? If so, then you are supposed to safely destroy them (not sure how!) They are identifiable possibly, whereas if you have anonymised the transcripts they can be held indefinitely for research purposes under the Data Protection Act.

(Tsk Tsk)

What did your consent forms say about how long you would keep the data? (???)

Anyway, our official policy what to put on participant info is we keep it for 10 yrs & then destroy. That 10 yr deadline would certainly include transcripts of what they said verbatim, even if anonymised. This is total stupidity because there is no system whatsoever to make sure we actually destroy such info within stated time. (I keep my mouth shut about this problem... people I know working in other industries are astounded our data don't have expiry dates).

If results were long ago published, I'd destroy as much as possible.