Doing Secondary Analysis

Originally published in 1988 Doing Secondary Analysis is a practical guide to the secondary analysis of large-scale survey data.

At a time when funding for primary data collection was increasingly constrained, the secondary analysis of high-quality government surveys offered the social scientist an unrivalled opportunity. This volume provided a guide which moves through every stage of ‘doing secondary analysis’. The authors begin with the conceptualization of the research problem and examine all the practicalities of using both standard rectangular data and hierarchical data, and of deriving simple and complex variables. They also provide a lucid description of the hardware and software available to the secondary analyst at the time.

This book successfully demonstrates the way in which secondary analysis can contribute both to the development of sociological theory and to social policy formation. The authors emphasize throughout that secondary analysis cannot be used as a short cut to quick ‘results’, but that as much care over defining the research problem and understanding the categories of data is needed as for any other kind of research.

While Doing Secondary Analysis was invaluable to those about to embark upon social research, it also offered many challenges to more experienced researchers.

Angela Dale OBE, FAcSS, is a British social scientist whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data and census microdata. After working as a researcher at the University of Surrey she became Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit at City University, London in 1989. She moved to Manchester University in 1993 to take up a chair in Quantitative Social Research and, in 1995, was instrumental in setting up the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (now the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research) and was Director until 2002. From 2002-2008 she was Director of the ESRC Research Methods Programme.

Sara Arber is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. She was President of the British Sociological Association (1999-2001), and is a Fellow of the British Academy. She has written over 250 journal articles on gender and ageing, inequalities in health, and sociology of sleep. Her books include Contemporary Grandparenting (with Virpi Timonen, 2012); Gender and Ageing (with Kate Davidson and Jay Ginn, 2003); and The Myth of Generational Conflict (with Claudine Attias-Donfut, 2000).

Mike Procter was a lecturer in sociology at Surrey University between 1973 and 2000. He focussed on teaching quantitative methods in social research and his teaching included regular contributions at the European Summer School (ECPR) in research methods and the Master’s in Social Research programme at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He also gave visiting contributions at European Universities in Spain and France. He was engaged in a variety of research projects including European attitudes to nuclear energy, the evaluation of the London-wide Anti-Poverty programme and the European Values Study. He died in 2019.