1. EVALUATE THE USEFULNESS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF SECONDARY DATA
OTHER THAN OFFICIAL STATISTICS.
Secondary data consists of information that already exists that other
researchers have studied such as media reports, government data or police
records. Secondary data is usually collected in a qualitative form where
correlations and patters can be seen, however, it can also be analysed in a
quantitative form.
Secondary data such as documents can be useful to sociologists when
researching. Personal documents such as letters, diaries and autobiographies
that people have created over the centuries benefit us in various ways. For
example Anne Frank’s diary highlighted how lives were affected during World
War II and this gave us historic insight that we now use in education in
subjects such as history. However, there is no way of knowing how accurate
or representative a particular document is as some documents were written
some time after the events they were referring to. Also sociologist Weber
used documents such as Benjamin Franklins books for his 'The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'As they are written for personal purposes
they tend to be high in validity, although some sociologists believe that
personal documents are always written with an audience in mind and
therefore can be argued that it is bias and unreliable. For example, the
memoirs of politicians may well be full of ‘old score setting’. Personal
documents also provide a genuine insight into important decision-making
processes as they can sometimes be the only records of a particular group or
activity, for example the diaries of Cabinet Ministers; without them we would
have never of known what happened in the group whose minutes of meeting
remained a secret for up to 100 years. In addition, personal documents
provide qualitative data which produces a much