From Context to Recontextualisation: Rethinking Secondary Analysis

Libby BishopESDS Qualidata, University of Essex

Sociology Graduate Student ConferenceAldeburgh

23 February 2006

Primary vs. secondary

• Obviously, SA means…– Analysis of pre-existing data

• But what about…– If data is co-constructed, can

“data” “pre-exist”?

Does secondary =second rate?

Savage, Mike(Professor, Manchester U)

Working-Class Identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Study

Sociology 2005 39: 929-946

(funded by Leverhulme)

Why should you care about secondary analysis?

• Secondary analysis raises issues critical for ANY qualitative inquiry:– Relationships with respondents– Co-construction of data– Consent for diverse uses– Context

Context-what is it?

• Can be approached from “top” or “bottom”– Top: cultural/institutional

meanings– Bottom: just the text, please– Middle: project knowledge

• “There was some nice things I brought…Brought them from the rocketship”(Holstein&Gubrium,04)

Many ContextsCONTEXT Original

projectCurrent project

Text Transcript, audio, etc.

Transcripts,

Interview setting

Room, dress, body lang.

Usually not documented

Project Original Q, messy analysis

New Q, “official” methodology

Cultural,institutional

Relevance depends on the res. Q

Relevant depends on the res. Q

Closing thoughts

• “Thus secondary analysis is not the analysis of pre-existing data; rather ‘secondary analysis’ involves the process of re-contextualising data (see the papers by Libby Bishop and Mike Savage for accounts of how reuse transforms the meaning of data). Once the data is transformed through the process of recontextualisation, it is not so much that we now have a new entity to be termed ‘secondary data’, and which might require a new methodology to be termed secondary analysis, rather, that through recontextualisation, the order of the data has been transformed, thus secondary analysis is perhaps more usefully rendered as primary analysis of a different order of data.” (Moore, 2005)