Doing Secondary Analysis

Angela Dale OBE, FAcSS, is a British social scientist whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data and census microdata. After working as a researcher at the University of Surrey she became Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit at City University, London in 1989. She moved to Manchester University in 1993 to take up a chair in Quantitative Social Research and, in 1995, was instrumental in setting up the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (now the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research) and was Director until 2002. From 2002-2008 she was Director of the ESRC Research Methods Programme.Sara Arber is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. She was President of the British Sociological Association (1999-2001), and is a Fellow of the British Academy. She has written over 250 journal articles on gender and ageing, inequalities in health, and sociology of sleep. Her books include Contemporary Grandparenting (with Virpi Timonen, 2012); Gender and Ageing (with Kate Davidson and Jay Ginn, 2003); and The Myth of Generational Conflict (with Claudine Attias-Donfut, 2000).Mike Procter was a lecturer in sociology at Surrey University between 1973 and 2000. He focussed on teaching quantitative methods in social research and his teaching included regular contributions at the European Summer School (ECPR) in research methods and the Master’s in Social Research programme at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He also gave visiting contributions at European Universities in Spain and France. He was engaged in a variety of research projects including European attitudes to nuclear energy, the evaluation of the London-wide Anti-Poverty programme and the European Values Study. He died in 2019.

• Acknowledgements. Glossary of Abbreviations. Preface. 1. An Introduction to Secondary Analysis 2. A Sociological Perspective on Secondary Analysis 3. Benefits and Costs of Secondary Analysis 4. The Potential of Hierarchical Surveys for Secondary Analysis 5. Choosing and Ordering a Dataset 6. Elements of Computing Technology 7. Software for Data Analysis 8. Getting Started: Preliminary Analysis 9. Conceptualizing Variables in Household-Based Surveys 10. The Derivation of Variables Using Household-Based Hierarchical Data 11. Exemplar: Inequality of Income and Assets. References. Index.