Research Methods Festival Programme

Programme for: Friday 2nd July pm

Venue: See conference programme

Bookings for the conference have closed.

Using secondary analysis in your PhD (FULL)

This session is now fully booked

2:30 - 5:30

Chair: Jo Wathan, University of Manchester

The UK has a large amount of high quality data available for secondary analysis. Although the majority is quantitative, mainly survey data, there are a growing number of qualitative resources.

This session will provide a range of illustrations where secondary analysis has been used to good effect in PhD theses, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods.

Each speaker will have up to 30 minutes and then there will be ample time for discussion following each presentation.

This short talk will discuss the merits, and pitfalls, of combining quantitative secondary data sources with primary qualitative data to answer one research question. Drawing on research about the employment of women in the UK television industry, I will outline how my PhD thesis used a mixed methods approach to present a holistic picture of the complex historical, political, organisational and practical issues that help to explain the current situation of women working in television. The emphasis is on designing a mixed rather than muddled methodology.

In this talk, I will revive some deeply repressed memories of trying to tackle my PhD research questions through the British Household Panel Study, the General Household Surveys, the National Child Development Study and the Family Resources Surveys. With all that nervous excitement, maddening frustration and tendency to go off on computer-related frolics of my own (so integral to secondary data analysis), it is a great surprise to me that I have managed to say anything at all about my subject: how contemporary changes in partnerships and family formation are impacting on pensions.

Slides

When I was appointed Research Fellow in SPRU it was suggested I consider registering to do a PhD on a part-time basis, linked to the work I was doing on hospital discharge arrangements. And so I stumbled into the relatively uncharted world of qualitative secondary analysis and set about re-using qualitative data from the project for my doctoral research. In this talk I will reflect on my experience of trying to re-use qualitative data in the absence of a literature on ‘how to do’ secondary analysis of this type of data. As a result, my (still unfinished) thesis has turned into an exploration of the nature of the methodology itself as well as an illustration of its empirical possibilities.

Just published: Janet Heaton, (2004) Reworking Qualitative Data, London: Sage