Secondary Analysis

  • Secondary analysis involves looking through already existing data which other researchers have collected.
  • Because there is such a collection of research which has already been done, sometimes the data that you need may already exist, saving time and energy.
  • Even though the data may not address your specific research question, there are creative ways to make it work.
  • Most of the available data deal with attitudes, behavior, and demographics.
  • The primary creators of this data are large organizations which want to know about people in general without a specific scientific goal.
  • The most widely used source is the General Social Survey which is a survey conducted in the US among other countries to address characteristics of US citizens.
  • The Statistical Abstract of the Unites States is another major source for statistical information.
  • There are many other statistics books available for use with varying topics and specialties.
  • The benefits of secondary analysis are that it saves the time and resources that would normally be put into data collection.
  • Its drawbacks are that you do not know how the research was conducted, it may have been done to serve a purpose, tainting the results, and that the data may not fit your question perfectly.
  • Validity is a problem because you may not me able to find the right unit of analysis, your definitions do not correspond with the definition used in the previous survey, or you must use the available statistics as a proxy for what you are looking for.