SECONDARY RESEARCH METHODS

A literature search is useful when embarking on your own reseach. it is standard to write a ‘literature review’ of previous relevant research before you start your own research. Sociologists can them aim for a different angle or avoid mistakes and watch out for methodological errors in others works. However this research may be flawed!

Includes historical documents, personal documents (letter, diaries, etc), government statistics, media content and research by other sociologists

good way to utilise triangulation or methodological pluralism

Primary data is information collected by the researcher to address a specific issue or problem. As it has not yet been gathered, or it may not be accessible it is data that is unique, first-hand and from an original data source. The data collected by. researcher using a variety of techniques such as interviews, focus groups, surveys and observations.

Positives of primary research data: more up to date information, tailored to your study and ensures relevance and can gather quantative or qualitative data. Can present unexpected findings and steer the research in a new direction, no need to rely on other sociologists (potentially unreliable) data)

Negatives of primary research is that you have to abide by modern ethics committees, more expensive, requires high levels of researcher skill, more time consuming, may have a researcher bias, could put the researcher at risk and access to participants may be hard. Researchers own values may bias the process, group you wish may not be accessible (too far away or may not want to participate)

Secondary data source refers to a data source that is already in existence and is being used either for a purpose for which it was not originally intended or by someone other than the researcher who collected the original data. Secondary data can be raw data or published summaries and you can tailor the data according to your research needs. Examples include large databases of surveys, censuses, and social and economic data that are too expensive or unfeasible for an individual to collect.

Positives of secondary data: quick, cheap, easy to collect, can access larger or more difficult popualtions

Negatives of secondary data: may not be reliable data, may not be wholly relevant data, data may not exist

WHY DO SOCIOLOGISTS USE SECONDARY SOURCES - information required already exists as secondary data, historical information is needed but the main participants are dead or too old to be interviewed (or may have forgotten), researcher is unable for financial or other reasons visit places to collect data first hand, the subject of the research contains illegal activities and it unsafe for the researcher to collect primary data and the data needs to be collected about groups who are unwilling to provide accounts of their activities

An advantage of secondary data is its practicality, conducting primary research is time consuming and difficult and can be expensive, so if relevant data already exists why not use it? It may allow a researcher to conduct research that they could not realistically carry out by gathering their own data as its dangerous, expensive or too big a sample for them to do themselves.

However, the researcher has no control over how the data was produced. it will ahve been produced for a purpose that is unlikley to have been for the purpose it is now being put. Eg statistics may be produced for political reasons and subject to manipulation or bais

Statistics use quantative data so have a larger sample size

There are two main ways of collecting official statistics: reggistration (eg registering births or for exams) and Official Surveys (eg the census, general household survey and the BCS)

Official statistics are statistics that are compiled by government agencies and made freely available to the public, includes the official census, official crime rate and exxamination results. They can be hard statistics (birth or death rates) or soft statistics such as the rate of unemployment, crime rates and domestic violence.

hard statistics are more factial as there is a legal obligation to provide the data whilst soft statistics are more open to interpretation and often only represent a percentage of the social issue they are looking to measure.

Many of the official stats in the Uk are made possible by the census which is conducted every ten years and compiles quantative data every household in the UK. Another example is the achievement data produced by the department of education of examinations and courses.

STRENGTHS - provide an overview into social issues that can be used to genertae further research in that area. Has a high reliability as the research that informs them is conducted on a regular basis (eg prison stats are released monthly). Can provide a useful insight into trends over time in areas such as education, health and family diversity.

WEAKNESSES - can be manipulated to serve political ideologies, aprtivularly as definition can change (eg poverty) and can lack validity eg the dark figure of crime.

Unofficial statistics are compiled by charities, businesses and other agencies, eg charity surveys, business surveys and non-governmental organisations who nee d to prove their existence)

PRACTICAL STRENGTHS OF OFFICIAL STATS - They are a free source of huge amounts of data, only the gov has the money and power to conduct surveys on such a huge scale, so the sociologists should use it. Allows comparisons between groups (eg Durkheim’s suicide study, they are also collected at regular intervals and over a long period of time, sociologists can use this to establish a ‘before and after’ eg the divorce reform act

PRACTICAL ISSUES WITH OFFICIAL STATS - definitions change over time (eg employment), definitions used by the gov may be different from those sociologists would use (eg poverty or truancy) and the statistics were likely conuduted for different purposes than sociologists want to use them for, not tailored. Eg for Durkheim there was no specifically telling him the religion of the suicide victims (not pivotal for gov, but pivotal for Durkheim)

ETHICAL STRENGTHS OF OFFICIAL STATS - already collected an in the public fomain, may be safer than for sociologists (eg if studying criminals) and using statistics that already exist is far less invasive for participants also (don’t have to reveal new info and info is already anonymised so less invasive privacy and confidentiality)

ETHICAL ISSUES WITH OFFICIAL STATS - stats on ‘intelligence’ data have been manipualted to justify the oppression of specific ethnic groups, such as black people, complete unethical, using statistics in socially research or in a way which serves the interests of one group over another is potentially harmful, eg manipulating stats on poverty to serve the interests of the ruling class (gov could ignore their needs)

THEORETICAL STRENGTHS OF OFFICIAL STATS - often very representative as grat care is taken over representive and in some cases the majority of of the population are surveyed or registration is complusory (eg marriage), Reliable as they are compiled by trained statisticians using. standardised procedure (eg death rates taken with occupation recorded on death certificate) and relaible as they record events that are complusory to register

THEORETICAL ISSUES WITH OFFICIAL STATS - some stats are less representative than others (eg BCS uses a sample of the population, 50,000 in 2014 and census struggles to survey groups like travellers are homeless people) validity is an issue sas ‘soft stats’ are less valid, eg the 2011 the BCS found that only 38% of crimes revealed by the survye were reported to the police and the police did not record all of these.

THEORETICAL VIEWS ON OFFICIAL STATS - positivists see them as ‘social facts’ (Durkheim) and interpreivists see them as ‘social constructs’ (eg ATKINSON argues that suicide rates are constructed by coroners using a ‘common sense approach’ and thus may be wrongly classified

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD - retains the main principles of the experiment but collects data on different societies or socisl groupd and then compares them with another society or group. Also tries to uncover cause and effect relationships, you compare two groups who are alike in all but one variable you are intersted in to see if this one difference has an effect (eg Durkheim’s study of suicide where he compared prots vs cats)

DOCUMENTS -   diaries, gov reports, medical records, novels, paintings, books, newspapers, letters, adverts, transcripts, textbooks, emails, blogs, web pages, parish registers, birth/death/marriage certificates, photos, court records, songs, receipts, school reports, police record, maps, shopping lists, train timetables, bank statements and registers

PUBLIC DOCUMENTS - are produced by organisations (eg schools, governments, charities, public enquiries etc) some of this is is publicly available for researchers to use (eg Ofsted reports, minutes of council meetings, published company accounts) but some may be kept behind closed doors. Official reports of public enquiries such as the Black report (1980), The Wolf Report and The McPherson report are key

HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS - also useful, such as paintings, parish and parliamentary records. These may be the only insight available into the past.

PERSONAL DOCUMENTS - are produced by or for individuals, often for private or family use such as letters, diaries and photo albums. These can be first-hand accounts of social events and personal experiences and may reveal the writer’s feelings and attitudes.

Thonas Znaniecki (1919) used documents including letters to study the migration of Polish people and social change. As interactionists, they were interested in people’s personal experiences of the events.

Documents allow an insight into what individuals think (verstehen). Eg DOUGLAS used suicide notes as one of his research methods in his famous study of the social meaning of suicide. He felt he was getting more valid data than Durkheim who used statistics (suicide rates). That it because he gained some insight into why people took their own lives rather than just that they did it.

SCOTT proposed 4 criterai for assessing the usefulness of documents: Autherniticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning

Documents may be the only source of information on an event (eg things in the past), documents can be used as an extra source of data to check the validity of results from primary methods (triangulation), reasonably cheap and readily available and interpretivisst love them as they are a rich source of qualitative data, allowing reseachers to understand people’s (the social actors) reality

The validity of some documents may be poor, people do not always reveal their true feelings, even diaries they may also lie in letters to other people. Analsing and trying to understand people’s personal writing takes a large amount of skill and uses a lot of interpretation which is open to bias, with diaries that were intended for publication (like that of some public figures) they may lie or exagerrate to make themselves sound better

Getting hold of personal documents in the first place may prove difficult or impossible. There may be gatekeepers such as family who wish to protect privacy, or the documents may be damaged, lost or simply never have existed (not everyone writes a diary)

Letters were intended to be read by a particular individual, diaries may not have been intended to be read at all, thus generating ethical issues (eg invasion of privacy). This might be less the case with diaries that were intended for publication (like those of some public figures) but that intention potentially undermines validity.

Content analysis is a method to analyse qualitative data. It is a technique that allows a researcher to take qualitative data and to transform it into quantitative data. The technique can be used for data in many different formats, eg interviewd transcripts, film and audio recaordings. The researcher conducting a content analysis will use ‘coding units’ in their work. These units vary widely depending on the data used (eg number of swear words in a film)

Conduct content analysis through: collect your data, read it and look for themes relevant to your research, identify characteristics relevant to your research (mutually exclusive), and then read it again tallying each time you see something identified in your categories.

Strengths of content analysis: a reliable way to analyse qualitative data as the coding units are not open to interpretation and so are applied in the same way over time and with different researchers, an easy technique, not too time consuming, allows statistical analysis

Weaknesses of content analysis: causality cannot be established as it merely describes the data, cannot extract any deeper menaing or explanation for the data patterns arising.