Secondary methods and data

Secondary Methods and Data

Official Statistics

Official statistics: These are numerical data collected by government agencies or other public bodies.
Useful for identifying social trends on a large scale, such as changes in crime rates or marriage patterns.
The validity of official statistics can be questionable, and sociologists must recognise potential bias or inaccuracies.

Documents

Personal documents: Diaries, letters, and emails can provide deep insight into personal experiences and perspectives.
Public documents: Government reports, newspapers, and company records can offer useful information about broader societal issues and contexts.
Issues to consider with document analysis include authenticity, representativeness, and meaning which the author originally intended.

Media Outputs

Media content can provide insights into societal values, norms, and beliefs. This is valuable for the study of areas such as gender, race, or class representation.
Analysis can include qualitative content analysis, studying themes and narratives, or quantitative content analysis, counting frequency of certain items.
It’s crucial to maintain an objective and critical approach in media analysis to avoid bias.

Big data: Massive data sets collected by tech companies from online behaviours can be analysed to observe patterns and relationships.
Online ethnography: This method studies online communities and social phenomena in the digital realm.
However, issues of privacy, consent, and data validity emerge with the use of digital data.

Use of secondary data

Secondary data analysis can be cost-effective and less time-consuming, as data is already collected.
It provides the opportunity to study past social conditions and changes over time.
But reliability and validity of secondary data can be hard to verify, and it may not exactly fit the researcher’s needs.