Secondary Sources

•  A type of data that a researcher could use for their research that they didn’t make. 
• What sources could they get their data from?

  Documentary

  Newspapers

  Novels

  Research by other people

  Records

  Case studies

  Official statistics 

  Photos

  Letters

  Footage

  Diaries
• Advantages - They provide useful background information about organisations, experiences or events that they are about. If you research different school cultures there will be already existing documentary sources which could be useful for a researcher. Qualitative data can give the researcher a useful amount of background information which gives the researcher a better picture on what they are researching. 
• Advantages - They are normally cheap to source the data that will be helpful for their experiment; it also produces a lot of triangulation for the data. It is easy for the researcher to access data from another culture that they might struggle to get data from. The researcher can also get a better perspective on social change from the past which a researcher can use to explore a changing social behaviour or attitudes.
• Disadvantages - Official statistics have to be used with caution, written documents such as diaries, letters or autobiographies could have been forged which could make them not genuine. Even if documents are genuine not all of the data may be true, some of the experiences or events that had been described could have been misinterpreted which could be due to the writer's opinions. Autobiographies tend to be one-sided and written for an audience, which is similar for letters that are written to a particular person as they are likely to be influenced by the writer's view of the recipient.