Professor Alison Park from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) discusses the importance of UK social science data infrastructures and outlines some of the opportunities and challenges they face.
You will no doubt have noticed the prominence of ‘data’ in the news; from announcements about new activity like the National Data Library to concerns about how our own personal data is being treated and used. These are huge areas of interest for me in my role at the ESRC, where we have been instigating, building and supporting data infrastructures since the council was founded back in 1965.
Our data infrastructures are less obviously visible than the physical telescopes, research vessels and labs relied upon by other research disciplines.
But they are no less important in enabling access to high-quality data at scale, removing the need for costly project-specific data collection and generating impactful, often highly policy-relevant, research.
Social science infrastructures fall into two broad camps:
- data collections (often in the form of surveys like Understanding Society and the British Election Study)
- data resources that provide support for data discovery, access, analysis and training.
Over the years the precise nature of these investments has evolved, reflecting innovations in the survey world and the opening up of new forms of research-relevant data, like the administrative records and smart data that underpin Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) and Smart Data Research UK (SDR UK)’s activities.
The UK Data Service
One constant in this is the UK Data Service, key components of which make it one of ESRC’s longest standing data infrastructures. The nomenclature has changed over the years, but the cornerstone of its work remains focused on services and support covering data acquisition, discovery, access and use.
I first came across the UK Data Service as a junior researcher back in the 1990s when I needed to prepare a survey dataset for deposit; today it is relied upon by over 48 thousand researchers to support their research across topics ranging from business and the economy to health and wellbeing.
The UK Data Service is one of a handful of data services that offer a full spectrum of data access methods, allowing it to serve the widest possible range of users and offer an access route proportionate to the specific dataset.
These access routes take three broad forms:
- open access (for example, an student downloading an open access training dataset without any registration required)
- safeguarded access (a researcher downloading an anonymised individual-level survey dataset having undertaken the appropriate registration and license agreements)
- controlled access (an experienced researcher analysing datasets that are particularly sensitive within a Trusted Research Environment, having undergone registration, authentication, training and accreditation).
Opportunities and challenges for data infrastructure
Recently there have been considerable changes in the world within which data services like the UKDS operate. Here are a few examples, along with what we’re doing at ESRC in response.
Trusted Research Environments
The last few years has seen a mushrooming in the number of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) providing secure access to data.
These are to be welcomed, not least because they allow the increasing analysis of sensitive data. However, their proliferation has made an already complex landscape more complicated still for users, and makes it important to restate the case that not all data needs to go through this most secure access route; many social science datasets are suitable for safeguarded access with its proportionate data access procedures.
ESRC’s Future Data Services Review will be published later this year and will set out how ESRC will invest in supporting improvements in relevant areas including data discovery, access and technology.
Artificial Intelligence
AI offers huge potential benefits to both infrastructures (for example, in how they carry out certain processes) and data users (for example, in finding, understanding and analysing datasets). But there are also many legal, ethical and technical issues that constrain AI use when it comes to social science datasets.
ESRC will be providing further details soon of support to help infrastructures and researchers move forwards in this area.
Training needs
We are also very aware of training needs when it comes to data intensive research, and what more we need to do as a funder to support and grow the pipeline of researchers with the skills needed to analyse these increasingly complex forms of data.
We will be launching our new Research Skills Strategic Leadership Hub investment in autumn 2025 and this will have the development of data driven research skills as a core priority. Additional activities to complement this will be published by ADR and SDR in their respective areas.
We will also be considering what other targeted investments are needed to support data driven research, ensuring that we focus on all forms of data and the breadth of methodological approaches (qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods) and supporting researchers at all career stages. We hope to be able to say more about this in early 2026.
Get in touch
These are some of the data issues that are preoccupying me at ESRC, working with colleagues across ESRC, UKRI and beyond. Do follow me and ESRC on LinkedIn if you’d like to stay in touch with what we are doing.
Share your examples
And if you’re wondering how you could help in the meantime, we are always looking out for great examples of impactful social science research using ESRC data infrastructures – if you’ve got good examples, I would love to hear about them.
More generally, you can always help us by citing the data you use. Doing this helps data infrastructures, and their funders, measure the impact of their work and provides the powerful examples we are always looking for to help illustrate the value of social science research.
About the author
Alison Park is the Deputy Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.
She oversees ESRC’s data infrastructure portfolio, which includes ADR UK, SDR UK, Understanding Society, the birth cohort studies and the UK Data Service. She is also responsible for ESRC’s talent and skills funding and is the SRO for UKRI’s new pilot scheme for interdisciplinary research, the cross-research council responsive mode fund.
Prior to joining UKRI, Alison worked at NatCen Social Research, before becoming the Director of CLOSER, a UCL-based research collaboration between social science and biomedical longitudinal studies.
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