Guidelines for data management and scientific integrity in ethnography

New protocols for scientific integrity and data management issued by universities, journals, and transnational social science funding agencies are often modelled on medical or psychological research, and do not take account of the specific characteristics of the processes of ethnographic research. These guidelines provide ethnographers with some of the most basic principles of doing such research. They show that the primary response of ethnographers to requests to share research materials with third parties should be to remain aware of the fact that these research materials have been co-produced with their research participants; that the collaborative ethnographic research process resists turning these materials into commodified, impersonal ‘data’ that can be owned and shared publicly; and that therefore the primary response of ethnographers should be to retain custody of research materials.