by Don Patrick Amarasinghe

Created on: November 07, 2010   Last Updated: November 23, 2010

Secondary data is  information collected by organizations such as Census Bureau, or trade organizations, and data or information generated by individuals.They are available in print form, or on CD form, or in the virtual space directly accessible by the researchers or to buy in the market.Common reasons  to use secondary data are the cost and time saving, wealth of information available on the topic under research, the purpose of the research and expected accuracy of findings. Secondary data is useful in research work at the beginning to see the overall picture of a situation and to define the research problems. No research would be undertaken without looking for secondary data at the initial stage of any research. Although a researcher essentially should begin with consulting secondary data sources, he should not assume that they are free from errors and flaws. This article points to these issues and ways to minimize secondary data problems.  The main issues relating to secondary data are data validity problems, reliability issues, trustworthiness of data and information, and data source bias.  A procedural, much easier issue in secondary data research is the copy right issue, which will be discussed in the last section of this article.

Validity Problems

Validity problem in secondary data research arises when the definitions of a situation by the original data collector or organization do not match with that of the theoretical definition of the secondary data user. Two important validity issues are construct validity, and the content validity of secondary data and information. The term construct can be defined as a property that explains the facets of a situation, event or a behavior. The way researcher understands a situation initially, and expresses his/her idea affects the way he/she designs methods to capture the details of the situation. Construct validity seeks agreement between concepts expressed by the researcher (constructs) and specific measuring devices or procedures adopted in a research. The following examples clarify the construct validity issue. The first  example shows the differences in construct definition by the secondary data user compared to the original researcher.

a) A secondary data researcher may define literacy as the ability to understand problematic written statement, and the ability to repeat it  as well as the ability to write grammatically correct statements, while the government census reports define

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