The Lithuanian Open Data Archive of Humanities and Social Sciences (LiDA) stores various data in these fields, and on the website you can find survey data, statistics, media content analyses, parliamentary debates, party programs and media texts. The archive is accessible to both researchers and students.
University activities are often closely related to the analysis of statistical data or survey data in order to support their written work with concrete examples.
Faced with such a situation, the student often looks for information in foreign articles, and most of them forget or even do not know that statistical and survey data can be found in the active data archive of the Faculty of Social, Humanities and Arts of the Kaunas University of Technology (KTU SHMMF).
Various data
LiDA describes the data in a way that makes it easy and quick to understand and can be used immediately, which is the biggest advantage of the archive, which separates it from the general information found on the Internet. True, although the data itself is in Lithuanian, descriptions of all data are also provided in English.
LiDA KTU was founded back in 2006. according to a project financed by EU structural funds. Since 2011 the archive is maintained by KTU SHMMF.
Data is provided to the archive not only by KTU researchers and scientific groups, but also by state institutions: the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, the Ministry of Culture, the Center for Strategic Analysis of the Government – these and other institutions are obliged to publish survey data collected on a national scale in the archive.
The collection of historical statistical data is historical data, the largest part of which is the situation of the Baltic States in the interwar period.
The data collected in tables, graphs, maps, and interactive maps describe the historical circumstances at that time. In the archive you can find census data from the time and interwar education data, such as the number of teachers or schools. Using the available data, it is possible to create visualizations based on how the data changed in some aspect between the wars.
The results of the survey clearly showed how quickly the relevance of a certain issue can change depending on the media attention given to that topic.
Research kits
The LiDA archive is constantly updating datasets containing the surveys conducted in Lithuania and abroad and their results, as well as other systematic information. Data sets can be analyzed in various slices and some very interesting facts can be learned.
For example, one of the latest policy collections “Plenary Sessions of the Seimas” contains transcripts of debates, protocols and other texts related to the plenary sessions of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania since 1990.
Another collection about the most important problems in Lithuania “Most Important Problems in Lithuania” contains the results of the study. The purpose of the study was to find out what sociopolitical problems Lithuania faced in 2016-2020, according to the Lithuanian population.
Respondents’ answers to open-ended questions by LiDA staff were coded using the International Comparative Political Agendas Project Instrumentation. In addition, respondents’ answers to open-ended questions about current problems in Lithuania were coded according to the criterion of whether the specified problems are directly related to Ukraine or not.
In yet another data set “ISSP 2020: Environment IV, November”, it is possible to analyze the opinion of Lithuanian residents about environmental problems and their impact on society from the collected survey results.
The surveys identified the most important social, economic and socio-political issues, including the opinion of the population on economic decisions and income differences. The society’s attitude towards various environmental problems was studied, the level of importance of the problems was assessed and the priorities of Lithuania were determined.
Benefits for students
Although the archive focuses directly on scientists, LiDA representative prof. Dr. Vaidas Morkevičius claims that students are potential scientists of the future. “For this reason, the archive is already introduced in lectures on social research methods, so that students are introduced to existing archive data and learn to analyze it,” says the professor.
According to the professor, research data can be very useful for students both in the first year and when writing a final thesis. One of the examples showing the need for an archive is the results of the survey “The most pressing problem for Lithuanian residents”. This survey was conducted for two years in a row – 2022 and 2023.
“The results of the survey clearly showed how quickly the relevance of a certain problem can change, taking into account the attention paid to that topic by the media,” says V. Morkevičius.
“Attention in the human agenda is very short-term,” says LiDA representative V. Morkevičius, in order to emphasize the importance of capturing certain statistical data or research results in order to use them in the future.
Archive data is divided according to different aspects, therefore, in order to use the data correctly, it is very important to delve into what group of people was studied, it is also important to take into account the country, period, geographical data – the information on the LiDA page is also compiled according to these criteria.
Finally, it is necessary to delve into the analyzed topic – this will be the easiest way to find the desired research data or results.
