Secondary Data

Secondary data are preexisting data that have been collected for a different purpose or by someone other than the researcher. These data may have been gathered originally for another research study or for administrative purposes. Secondary data may be available through government agencies, researcher-contributed databases, public or private archives, institutional records, or arrangements with individual researchers. Researchers may use secondary data to investigate new research questions, corroborate or extend the original analyses, or compare to other (primary or secondary) data sources.

The practice of using secondary data is well established in quantitative research traditions where large-scale databases and data depositories provide ready access to censuses, national and international educational assessments, and other numeric data on a multitude of topics. In contrast, secondary data has a more recent history in qualitative research traditions, with the first methodological publications about secondary analyses of qualitative data appearing in the mid-1990s.

Technological advances, interdisciplinary opportunities, pressures for increased research productivity, and encouragement for large-scale projects may all contribute to researchers' decisions to use secondary data. Public funding agencies have developed policies to explicitly encourage data archiving and data sharing as part of their mandates toward openness, accountability, and public ownership of data.

Conducting research using secondary data can entail considerable savings in time, money, and labor compared to gathering firsthand data. Reliance upon secondary data can also reduce intrusions into [Page 804]research participants' lives because the data that they supply in a single research study could inform a broad range of research projects, thereby maximizing potential societal benefits and scholarly contributions.

There are, however, considerable ethical and methodological issues that researchers must consider before using secondary data. A major challenge of secondary data is the potential to undermine the autonomy of the individuals who provided the original data by limiting opportunities for those individuals to provide informed consent to participate in this secondary research. Privacy legislation and ethics review board procedures consider the extent to which the data are identifiable, the potential harms that research participants could face, the relationship between the purposes for the original data collection and the current research project, the expectations that the participating individuals would consent or object to the research, and the potential social good of the research. To the extent possible, individuals engaged in data collection for research or administrative purposes should consider possible secondary uses of those data and seek permission at the data collection stage.

Another challenge for qualitative researchers using secondary data is the limited relationship with the participants and context for the data. Secondary research conducted by a different researcher undermines the close relationships between researchers and participants that are a key feature of qualitative research. A new researcher who was not involved in the original research study will not know what information the original respondents considered sensitive and will therefore be unable to calculate risks involved in divulging sensitive information. This may explain why qualitative research undertaken with secondary data typically involves researchers who have some firsthand knowledge of the original research.