TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY IN ACCOUNTABILITY RELATIONSHIPS IN HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM: THE CASE OF DATA WAREHOUSE PROJECT IN KAZAKHSTAN

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 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.