Information Management in Social Research: From Data, Information, and Digital Content Collection to Storage or Disposal

Resumo

Information, its possession, the ability to manage it, to apply it for various purposes have always been
important both at the personal level and at the level of the organization, institution. These abilities
were especially actualized when, together with new information and communication technologies, the
amount of data, information, and later various digital content increased significantly, and its
transmission time, in contrary, decreased significantly. On the one hand, it greatly facilitated all
information, data, etc. search and transfer processes, but at the same time began to raise other
challenges - related to the management, storage, transmission, dissemination of accumulated
information. At the same time the need of new competences also raised. It's obvious, that by that
reason, into The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (Dig Comp 2.2) one of the first groups of
competencies is information and data literacy which consists from such main competences: browsing,
searching and filtering as well as evaluating and managing data, information and digital content.
Those skills and competences are important not only in personal and professional life of all of us, but
also in sciences and research work, especially in social Sciences where personal data (such as
gender, age, social, marital status and etc.) is very important for better understanding the analysed
results. In majority of social research those criteria enable deeper understanding of the essence of
different phenomenon in social life, to distinguish differences and identify similarities, to make more on
the evidence based and more proper conclusions and recommendations. But according to the new
regulation of the data in Lithuania „Due to the provisions of the guidelines for assessing compliance
with scientific research ethics" those processes should become much more controlled than it was
earlier. In the Regulation the main principles of manage the research data are presented. According to
the Regulation the procedures for keeping, storing and accumulating data collected during social
research have been heavily regulated, which not only makes it very difficult to conduct relevant
research, but also could encourage at all not to collect relevant data or even to avoid certain research
methods, especially those, during which personal data is required.