Question

What are the major problems in using secondary data sources, such as birth or death certificate data? What, if anything, can the evaluator do about these problems? (250 words)

Answer 1

Ans --

Examples of secondary sources:

• Bibliographies.
• Biographical works.
• Reference books, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases.
• Articles from magazines, journals, and newspapers after the event.
• Literature reviews and review articles (e.g., movie reviews, book reviews)

The major problems with using secondary data sources are that the data may not be uniform across the entire study population. For example, birth certificates and death certificates may not be available for everyone.

• Sometimes if the request for the data is old enough, the information has been deleted or lost.

• Furthermore, the data source may not provide uniform information (not every death certificate or birth certificate is the same).

•Much of the information listed on these data sources can be alterred. For example, in order to obtain a birth or death certificate certain information needs to be provided by the family.

Secondary sources are very helpful in conducting research but there are some problems associated with the use of these sources. The actual and the most basic issue is always with the validity and reliability of the source from which the data is taken. Primary sources like experiments are very reliable and valid as compared to the secondary sources.

• Validity and reliability

Validity and reliability are very important concerns in research and they cannot be taken for granted. Some secondary sources are as much reliable as primary sources like census as it covers the whole population.

•Personal bias

Personal diaries and other records like newspapers, mass media products can be biased. Newspapers, magazines and websites do not use rigorous and well-controlled methods in documentation. Most of the time such writings are opinion-based and they are far from facts

•Obsolete data

Sometimes secondary sources are available to be used in the research but they are very old. Old data is of no use to be used in the research.

  • Format of data

The format of the data can be totally different and the researcher cannot use it in his research. Using another format in data collection that is not related to your research format can give biased and invalid results.

  • Availability of data

Secondary sources are usually preferred in the research because of their ease of availability, in case it is hard to collect data using secondary sources the researcher should not use it.