PILOT logo, post doc PILOT logo, information PILOT logo, literacy PILOT logo, online PILOT logo, tutorial welcome information contents page search and retrieve contents page acquiring and managing information contents page new technologies contents page
digital footprint contents page
copyright contents page IL pilot license contents page databases contents page publication process contents page
Welcome

 

Transcript 3

There are two or three limitations of secondary data but far the most import one is you don't have control over the questions that have been asked and often times the questions being asked are not quite the question you really wanted to ask. And you have to be fairly disciplined in accepting that it's important to have a clear idea of what the variables in a secondary dataset measure and the distance between that measure and what you might ideally have liked them to be measuring. And it's tempting to pretend that they re-measuring what you want them to measure rather than what they actually do measure. So that's one drawback.

A second drawback is, it's quite time-consuming to organise secondary data analysis in that before you get into the analysis you have to have a good knowledge of the documentation that comes with the dataset. You need to be sure that you understand how the sampling was organised. You need to be sure that you understand how the different variables in the dataset were defined and created, what was done with the missing values, what was done with don't knows, what was done with the routing of questions to different types of respondent in the survey.

And quite often it takes quite a bit of time to get your head round all those details but they are important details to understand because they are fundamental to interpreting the results of any secondary data analysis that you undertake on that dataset.

Writing a data management plan by Edina, University of Edinburgh, modified by Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/introduction.html

GCU logofont +  |   font -  |   Nextsmall plane | small plane Back |  unit home small plane

Creative Commons Licence
PILOT by Imperial College London, modified by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.