Secondary Sources, Documents

What are secondary sources?

Data collected by someone else

(eg. official statistics, schools reports, diaries, media, historical documents)

Strengths of official statistics

Cheap, quick, large scale, good for trends, often, representative, allows hypothesis testing.

Weakness off official statistics

May be socially constructed

(e.g crime starts dependent on reporting)

Strengths of personal documents

May lack representativeness, can be selective/self-edited, authenticity can be questionable

Advantages of Public documents

Accessible, cheap, often reliable, high validity and rich qualitative data

(eg. school league tables)

Why might documents lack validity?

Author may have bias, written for a particular audience or purpose, may omit important details