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Title: Secondary data: Engaging numbers critically

Citation Type: Book, Section

Publication Year: 2007

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Abstract: Secondary data is the data that researchers do not create themselves but use in their research. Compared to primary data that is generated over the course of fieldwork (e.g. measuring water quality or interviewing respondents), “secondary” data is already created by someone else. Secondary data providers include government agencies and private companies or such sources as published scientific studies, archives, or collections. Most commonly, the term “secondary data” refers to relatively large databases that individual researchers would not be able to gather themselves (e.g. census data, newspaper archives, inventories of resources, or satellite imagery). Although called “secondary,” this data informs a great deal of academic work and is central to entire subdisciplines in the social and environmental sciences. Moreover, the importance of secondary data in research and policy development is likely to increase with time. This is because information technologies have facilitated an explosion of a wide range of both environmental and socio-economic digital information as well as methods for its analysis. Widely available and accepted as legitimate, secondary data has come to influence in important ways what kind of knowledge we produce and how. The ubiquity of secondary data, especially within the global north, demands that we carefully evaluate its potentials and limitations before integrating it into any research project or using it to answer specific research questions. This chapter addresses some of the issues related to the use of secondary data by geographers. We point to the wide variety of secondary data and its many sources and we discuss the important advantages and limitations of secondary data. We then address issues of particular importance to geographers: ecological fallacy and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) as they relate to secondary data. Finally, we illustrate the need to engage creatively and critically with secondary data by focusing on non-standard approaches to analysis that use “mixed” research methods. Throughout the chapter, we will use examples from our and our students’ work in urban geography (cases from Moscow and New York) as well as resource management (the case of fisheries in the Northeast US).

Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/14cb/50f473f168495a28bf621f74b85fbb8a21c9.pdf

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Authors: Martin, Kevin

Editors: Jones, John Paul; Gomez, Basil

Pages: 45

Volume Title: Research Methods in Geography: A First Course

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Population Data Science

Countries: United States