Data Management for Psychological Science: A Crowdsourced Syllabus

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Abstract

Data management - including data preparation, cleaning, storage, and sharing - is critical to psychological research. Despite its importance, data management is rarely formally taught to students. This syllabus provides detailed descriptions of data management topics, resources, and activities that can be used to create a course or workshop on data management. The syllabus is formatted as a series of modules that motivate the importance of high-quality data management and provide information on best practices at various stages - (1) What is data management and why should we care about it? , (2) Data setup and collection, (3) Data storage, (4) Data cleaning and analysis, (5) Data sharing, (6) Locating existing data, and (7) Writing a data management plan. Each module raises key questions and common errors, as well as resources and suggested assignments to help identify and circumvent mistakes and vulnerabilities. The syllabus is extremely comprehensive and should be tailored for individual use, including putting more emphasis on data management practices specific to one’s subfield. There are many different types of resources, including journal articles, blog posts, podcasts, slide decks, etc. and the syllabus can be adapted for graduate seminars, advanced undergraduate courses, or individual study. Because this syllabus links to work from many researchers, please be sure to give appropriate credit to content creators.