primary / secondary data Flashcards
What is primary data?
Data collected by the researcher themselves
What is secondary data?
Data that is already available to sociologists
What are personal documents?
Private documents for a persons own use which record part of a persons life e.g diaries, letters, photos
Who favours personal documents?
Interpretivists
Practical +/- of personal documents
+ Secondary - more time/cost efficient as easily accessible
- May not find what they need - takes lots of time to go through
Ethical +/- of personal documents
Not many ethical issues - already released to public domain
What are public documents?
Produced for public knowledge e.g Ofsted reports
What are historical documents?
Anything form the past
Practical +/- of public/historical documents
+ Easily accessible
- Some documents may be missing damaged or kept private
Ethical +/- of public/historical documents
Depends on document - keep anonymous, ask for consent from relatives
Who favours public/historical documents?
Interpretivists
Strengths of qualitative secondary sources
- May provide only info in the area
- Useful for interpretivists - gain an insight into worldview
- Useful for assessing peoples concerns
- Valid
- Rich detail
Weaknesses of qualitative secondary sources
- Have to consider credibility, authenticity, meaning, representativeness
- Unethical?
- Positivists against as hard to analyse
- Subjective
What is a content analysis?
A research method that produces primary quantitative data from the study of qualitative secondary sources
Strengths of content analysis
- Relatively cheap
- Reliable - produce quantitative data - positivists favour
- Very insightful - enables discovery of things that aren’t so obvious - Ethical - no involvement with people
