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

3. Using old data to test new ideas

Why is that tremendous amount of work demanded? What is the motive for undergoing this effort? What are the potential uses of old data, and in which ways can they be used for testing new ideas?

Using old data for new ideas would be the colloquial description of what has been defined in technical terms as secondary analysis. The situation is best characterised by the fact that the researcher going to analyse the data is not familiar with (all) the phases of data collection for the respective data set (1).

To illustrate this idea by an example, think about the question: "How often do you talk to your neighbour about politics"? In the concept of the principal investigator this question can be an indicator for political interest. Collecting the answers to that individual question in a cross-national representative survey will cost between one and three thousand US Dollar. The costs for the complete survey, which would be addressed to some two or three thousand people, covering about one hundred questions altogether, would cost between 120,000 US $ and 300,000 US $. This provides a tremendous information value. Now, think about chances to reactivate this information for other purposes. This indicator for political interest quoted above could be used for a completely different purpose. If another researcher is interested in the concept of integration into neighbourhood, he may be very happy to come across this question which has been originally asked to measure political interest. It would also fit into this new frame of reference measuring neighbourhood integration. Of course a well trained researcher will not rely on just this one indicator, but certainly it would contribute to solve his data needs without requiring new field research.

This simple case shows that it is not only possible to reanalyze old data under the same hypothesis as the principal investigator. It also illustrates how old data may be used to answer new research questions and test new frames of references. This adds enormously to the informational value of original data, in particular if it is well documented and prepared for further analysis.

For what different purposes can data from archives be used? The first and simplest case would be for descriptive purposes. In our example we would not be looking any more at the data under the concept of political behaviour, but rather under the concept of communication behaviour in neighbourhoods, and reinterpret the question originally intended to measure political interest under our new concept of neighbourhood integration.

A particular contribution of the data archives can be made to comparative research, both, across nations and over time. In the early years of data archives, when secondary analysis was not yet a popular research strategy, the idea of comparative research based on archival data was promoted in conferences in the early sixties (2). The idea was that surveys not originally designed for comparative purposes could be fixed into comparative research designs a posteriori. The precondition for this would be that corresponding questions in other surveys could be identified, be it surveys earlier in time and/or surveys in other communities or nations. In the first case this would allow for comparative analysis over time, in the second for comparative analysis across societies or nations.

A number of methodological and technical requirements have to be observed of course. Just to mention the most important: Some methodologists require that the questions should be functionally equivalent, whereas others claim that the question texts must be phrased identically. Frequently it is not the linguistic identity which matters. Sometimes it is much more important, whether the questions are understood by the respondent in the same way. Thus a thermometer or scale used as a representation for intensity of attitudes in the more developed societies may be replaced by a ladder in less developed societies. Both, thermometer and ladder would still measure the same dimension in the conceptual world of the respective respondents. A second requirement would be comparability of samples, thus a cross­-national representative random sample would be hard to compare with the local quota sample in one community in a different nation.

Several other factors have to be controlled as well, in particular contextual influences at the time of field work or political or environmental events, which are related to the topic of the research.

Prominent examples for an international effort to make individual studies available for comparative research are the collections of electoral data. Several projects in the archival world were coordinated to collect the most important election studies of the past decades. The Zentralarchiv, for instance, has compiled a pool of prominent studies to the national elections (Bundestagswahlen) since 1949 up to now. Similar projects have been undertaken in other countries as well. The studies from Germany were made available to other European archives and were incorporated into the holdings of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) archives in Ann Arbor. These data sets were intensively used, e.g. in one year more than 700 data sets from the election studies were distributed all over the United States. Other examples for studies from different fields could be quoted as well. This shows that the potentials of secondary analysis are not only available in principle, but that they are actually being used on a large scale. The archival networks are contributing to make national data resources available internationally. In this way they are enabling the international science community to share available data and to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge by contrasting data from different sources.

Equally important are longitudinal studies which can be compiled ex post. In a research project on ''Attitudes towards Technology" it is of crucial importance to include data collected in the fifties and sixties ­ in order to answer the research question ­ whether potential threats from new technologies have decreased the level of technology acceptance or whether tendencies to reject new developments concentrate on particular technologies only, and if so, under what circumstances.

Now imagine that we could get hold of a good collection of surveys taken in earlier years; detailed studies about changes going on in this phase and hopefully additional studies in the years to come. Analyzing this data base over time could give us a good picture of what changes actually have taken place in the orientation of the population and of the extent to which new technical concepts did have an impact on subgroups of the population.