Content:
 

1. Prerequisites and uses of secondary analysis
2. Data for secondary analysis
3. Using old data to test new ideas
4. Technical means to add to the informational value of data
5. The potential of secondary analysis for teaching
6. Creating the data base for social science research
7. Notes

2. Data for secondary analysis

On January 1979 "The Economist" reported about the misuse of social science data. One of the cases quoted referred to a French opinion poll about immigrants in France. The French people were asked to answer the question, whether they thought that immigrants should be sent home or should remain in France. This survey was conducted under contract of Government. The director of the respective field research institute was shocked by the outcome of that particular poll. The raw figures showed that the 77% of the respondents claimed that immigrants should be sent home. Without warning the Government he reported that only 57% were in favour of sending foreign workers home. So he reduced the actual findings by 20% in order to make the results more acceptable.

That is not a typical case for social research, but it is one of the cases which you would like to control better, if it happens. Therefore, "The Economist" made the plea that a polls watcher was needed to monitor what was being reported as a basis for further decisions.

Here we are very close to one of the potential uses of secondary analysis. Social science data archives cannot take over the role of polls watchers, but they can make archive data available to the social science community in order to stimulate scientific discussion of the findings and results based on the respective data.

Whereas it is not the primary goal of the archives to check the analyses and interpretations of principal investigators, they do, however, concentrate on the methodological and technical control of data formats recorded on diskettes, CD ROMs or other media and on the data documentation. In contrast to the situation of information and documentation in the field of social science literature, data archives have to invest a tremendous amount of work in order to make the original material, given to the archives by researchers or field research institutes, usable for further analysis. In an extreme case it may be necessary to rewrite the complete documentation for a data set. This, however, does not mean changing information; it is rather upgrading and reducing the ambiguity of the representation and format of the respective information.