Speaker: Cara Booker, ISER, University of Essex
Reusing secondary data offers significant advantages, such as saving time, expanding research scope, and allowing researchers to analyse large, existing datasets for trends across different time points or geographical contexts. However, it comes with challenges. Researchers must ensure the original data aligns with their research objectives, raising ontological concerns about the data’s representation of reality. Epistemologically, using pre-collected data may limit the depth of understanding, as it was not originally gathered for the specific research question. Additionally, issues like data quality, missing information, and contextual differences can complicate interpretation.
Secondary and archival social science data has been vital to expanding the field and has led to many important research and policy paradigms. This webinar will provide an introduction into secondary and archival social science data. The webinar will cover a number of topics including where to find the data, the considerations of using different types of data, how sampling will impact analyses and interpretation of results, some data management tips and examples of analyses conducted with secondary social science data. While there are no prerequisites to this webinar, you are encouraged to read Sage Research Methods – Archival and Secondary Data for more detailed background and information.
