By: Duncan Hull
One of the core tenets of scientific research is replication. This gets at the reproducibility standard of scientific research. Despite calls for more replication in the social sciences, replication studies are still rather rare. In part, this is the product of journal editors’ and reviewers’ strong preferences for original research. It is also due to scholars not making their data publicly available. Many of my colleagues in academia, especially those who conduct experimental (lab experiments) research, do not typically make their data publicly available, though even here anonymized data should be available.
Replication datasets are not valuable solely for replication studies. In any dataset there are unused variables. A budding scholar or a research-oriented practitioner might be interested in your “leftover” variables or data points. You can’t foresee what others will find interesting.
Contents
What You Can Do
If you have data, share it. Not only is this being generous, but there is some evidence it may even be good for your career (citations, etc.). If you don’t have the capacity to warehouse it yourself, there are archives available for you. A good choice is Gary King’s Dataverse Network Project.
My Data
In the spirit of replication and extension, I would like to let people know which data sources I have available. If you’d like any of it, shoot me a message and we’ll figure out a way to get it to you.
Spanish Nationalist Event Data, 1977-1996
First, there is a replication archive of data I used in my dissertation. If you’re interested in Spanish nationalist contentious politics — specifically, data on violent and non-violent nationalist protests — check out http://contentiouspolitics.gregorysaxton.net/. This site was set up to make publicly available the data used in my dissertation and subsequent publications. There you will find background information on the project, codebooks, data, and copies of articles published using the data. You can browse and search the data and view various interactive graphs. The entire dataset is also available for downloading.
Twitter Data
Twitter data are generally publicly available. However, if you have a pre-defined set of users you can only grab their latest 3,200 tweets, which in some cases is only one year’s worth of data. And in other cases, especially if you want to follow a specific hashtag or collect user mentions or retweets, you can only go back one week in time. For this reason, sometimes it can very helpful if someone else has the historical data you may need. Here are some of the historical data I have, showing the sample of organizations, date range for which data are available, and citations for articles that used the data. If you are interested in it for your own research purposes let me know.
- Nonprofit Times 100 organizations — 2009
- 145 advocacy nonprofit organizations — April 2012
- 38 US community foundations (tweets as well as mentions) — July-August 2011
Facebook Data
Facebook data for organizations is typically public and can be downloaded via the Facebook Graph API. That said, I have some data available on a sample of large nonprofit organizations.
- Nonprofit Times 100 organizations — December 2009
- Nonprofit Times 100 organizations — April-May 2013
Website Data
Website data. Historical data can often be gathered from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but “robots exclusions” and other errors can prevent this. The following datasets are available:
- 117 US community foundations (transparency and accountability data) – fall 2005 (Saxton, Guo, & Brown, 2007; Saxton & Guo, 2011)[1][2]
- 400 random US nonprofit organizations – fall 2007 (Saxton, Guo, & Neely, 2014)[3]
This is only a partial list of the data I have available. I’ll add to this as more data become cleaned and available.
References
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Saxton, G. D., Guo, C., & Brown, W.. (2007). New dimensions of nonprofit responsiveness: The application and promise of internet-based technologies. Public Performance & Management Review, 31, 144-173. [Bibtex]
@article{Saxton2007,
Abstract = {The incredible diffusion of the Internet is ushering in a new era of possibilities for nonprofit organizations to engage with and be responsive to their core stakeholders, yet little is known of the range and extent of such practices. To enhance our understanding of these increasingly important yet understudied phenomena, we conduct a comprehensive study of 117 community foundations' Web-based stakeholder responsiveness practices. Our examination of four key dimensions of online responsiveness reveals a number of best practices and areas of untapped potential. We argue that online stakeholder responsiveness is increasingly a strategic concern; to successfully fulfill their mission, organizations thus need to consider seriously the amount and interactivity of the content they target at each of their core constituents.},
Author = {Saxton, Gregory D. and Guo, Chao and Brown, William},
Date-Added = {2014-02-14 00:40:05 +0000},
Date-Modified = {2014-02-14 16:52:38 +0000},
Doi = {10.2753/pmr1530-9576310201},
Journal = {Public {P}erformance & {M}anagement {R}eview},
Pages = {144-173},
Title = {New Dimensions of Nonprofit Responsiveness: {T}he Application and Promise of Internet-Based Technologies},
Url = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1738762},
Volume = {31},
Year = {2007},
Bdsk-Url-1 = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1738762},
Bdsk-Url-2 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/pmr1530-9576310201}}[Bibtex]
@article{Saxton2011,
Abstract = {Nonprofit organizations are increasingly using Internet-based technologies to address accountability. This article presents a set of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical innovations to help understand this phenomenon. First, this article presents a conceptual framework that delineates two key dimensions of Web-based accountability practices: disclosure and dialogue. It then posits a four-factor explanatory model of online accountability incorporating organizational strategy, capacity, governance, and environment. Last, it tests the model through a content analysis of 117 U.S. community foundation Web sites combined with survey and financial data. The descriptive statistics show that the Web site has been more effectively used to provide financial and performance disclosures than to provide dialogic mechanisms for stakeholder input and interactive engagement. Our multivariate analyses, in turn, highlight capacity- and governance-related variables, especially asset size and board performance, as the most significant factors associated with the adoption of Web-based accountability practices.},
Author = {Saxton, Gregory D. and Guo, Chao},
Date-Added = {2014-02-14 00:40:05 +0000},
Date-Modified = {2014-02-14 16:55:50 +0000},
Doi = {10.1177/0899764009341086},
Journal = {Nonprofit and {V}oluntary {S}ector {Q}uarterly},
Keywords = {accountability_practices disclosure newmediaandnonprofits nonprofit_organizations},
Pages = {270-295},
Title = {Accountability Online: {U}nderstanding the Web-Based Accountability Practices of Nonprofit Organizations},
Url = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1733610},
Volume = {40},
Year = {2011},
Bdsk-Url-1 = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1733610},
Bdsk-Url-2 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0899764009341086}}[Bibtex]
@article{Saxton2014,
Abstract = {Nonprofit organizations face intense competition in the market for "investors" -- donors who are willing to finance the organization's social output. Increasingly, donation decisions are made online, and organizations have responded by implementing substantive Internet disclosure and reporting regimes. We posit here that the voluntary disclosure of financial and performance information inherent in these regimes provides additional relevant information to market participants, and thus has a positive impact on the receipt of charitable contributions. We test our hypotheses on two samples of US nonprofit organizations by building on the well established "economic model of giving" (Weisbrod & Dominguez, 1986), which has donations serving as the proxy for demand. Our central research question is thus: Are donors willing to "pay" for Web disclosure? Results indicate a positive relationship between the level of charitable contributions and the amount of financial- and performance-related disclosure provided by an organization on its website; however, conditions dictate whether performance or financial disclosure dominates. The results suggest web disclosures are value relevant in the market for charitable contributions.},
Author = {Saxton, Gregory D. and Neely, Daniel and Guo, Chao},
Date-Added = {2014-02-14 00:40:05 +0000},
Date-Modified = {2014-04-24 19:13:27 +0000},
Doi = {10.1016/j.jaccpubpol.2013.12.003},
Journal = {Journal of {A}ccounting and {P}ublic {P}olicy},
Keywords = {Voluntary disclosure; Internet financial reporting; nonprofit organizations; donations; charitable contributions},
Pages = {127-144},
Title = {Web disclosure and the market for charitable contributions},
Url = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1912966},
Volume = {33},
Year = {2014},
Bdsk-Url-1 = {http://ssrn.com/abstract=1912966},
Bdsk-Url-2 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccpubpol.2013.12.003}}
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