strengths

• P used to study events difficult to access

  • Because secondary data is being used, comparisons can be made using historic data. The study of past events is not possible using other experimental methods.

  Secondly, the comparative method can be used to study events that it would not be possible to study in a lab or in the field. For example, the most famous example of the comparative method was carried out by Durkheim (1897) in his classic study of suicide (we will look at this in more detail later), which relied on analysing the official statistics of suicide from different countries
• Ethical – Avoids the harm and deception

  Using quantitative secondary sources will inevitably be ethical for a number of reasons:

  • Official statistics are published,
  • The identities of those involved are not known as the data is in numerical form.
• Theoretical – Reliable

  It would be very easy for a second, third, etc researcher to take the same secondary quantitative data and analyse the variables to reach the same conclusion regarding cause and effect relationships.