
Transcript 8
The standard of data documentation has improved tremendously over the last twenty years or so. It's now a standard for funding councils or ONS or other bodies who are involved in the creation of secondary data to pay much more attention to the quality and the comprehensiveness of the data documentation that goes with it.
So usually the problem that you face is not so much that there's a question that you can't find an answer in the data documentation rather the problem is finding whereabouts it is in what is often very voluminous data documentation - that answer may lie. So that you'll have copies of all the different questionnaires that may have been used in a study with different kinds of questionnaires for different kinds of respondents. You had different information about the different routings to those questionnaires that the different respondents will have gone through. You've got for example, syntax and how new variables were derived from the original variables created from respondents' answers to the questions and so on and so on.
On top of that you've got information about the way the sample was constructed - what was done with difficult to contact, difficult to identify members of the sample - things like that, so that there's a lot of information to get your head around when you start to do a piece of secondary data analysis.