ABSTRACT
Despite legislation introduced more than a decade ago providing citizens with the right to request data from public authorities in the United Kingdom, researchers have been slow on the uptake. Recently, a number of studies have identified the opportunities and challenges in using Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation and documented the utilisation of FOIs as a data collection tool across health, social and criminological research. However, few papers have discussed the process of analysing this data. This chapter draws on three criminological studies, which have all used FOI requests to collect data from police forces in the UK, to outline how data was collected, negotiated and analysed. One of the major challenges in analysing this data is the inconsistent responses from police forces and managing large volumes of data. This chapter closes with a brief discussion on how these challenges can be overcome and the implications for both researchers and public authorities.
