Abstract:
The study investigates the connection between data reliability and trust in
accountability relationships between participants of the higher education system in
Kazakhstan. Institutional data in Kazakhstan has a great potential to become an important
source of information both for the government and universities to make effective decisions
and conduct accurate research. In order to get that the Kazakhstani higher education system’s
participants should be able to transform the existing internal data into a transparent and
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reliable national data warehouse system. The success of this initiative depends on capabilities
of the process’ participants to openly interact and to take shared responsibility for the quality
of the provided data. Are Kazakhstani university leaders ready today to share internal
strategic data for common benefits of the education system? Are university leaders ready to
be accountable and take shared responsibility for the quality of data?
The overarching question of the research is: What are the main factors influencing
willingness of the education system’s participants to share the reliable internal information?
The main hypothesis of the research is that the phenomenon of trust/distrust is the leading
factor influencing the participants’ willingness to share/not share the internal information and
predetermining the quality of the data provided.
The research was held on basis of the case of the Kazakhstani Higher Education Data
Warehouse Project (DWP). The project was jointly developed by the Learning Alliance for
Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), the Nazarbayev University
Graduate School of Education’s Research Institute (Kazakhstan), and the Ministry of
Education and Science, Republic of Kazakhstan. The Data Warehouse is a utility for
collecting and storing data elements from higher education institutions allowing providing the
universities with comprehensive and comparative information for analytical and planning
work. Taking advantage of being among the members of the Data Warehouse project’s team I
used the Data Warehouse as a case for evaluating universities’ reaction to data transparency
promised by the project, analyzing the reliability of data, provided by the participating
universities and exploring the reasons of university trust or distrust to this initiative.
Mix methods approach was used for the purposes of the current research. The
quantitative analysis of demographic data, submitted by the participating universities, allowed
for making conclusions concerning the quality of the data. This analysis helped to reveal
consistent patterns explaining an attitude of universities to data completion requirements. An
ethnographic case study observation allowed to understand the process of interaction between
experts and participants of the Data Warehouse Project and investigate factors of the
trust/distrust in naturalistic settings. 16 universities that were invited to take part in the DWP
project became also a sample for the current research.