Secondary Analysis for Digitized Data: Its Utility in Finding and Selecting Indicators of Social Well-Being

Secondary Analysis for Digitized Data: Its Utility in Finding and Selecting Indicators of Social Well-Being

Gennaro Iorio, Marco Palmieri, Geraldina Roberti
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8473-6.ch049
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Abstract

Secondary analysis for quantitative data is a social research method traditionally employed for statistical analysis of administrative data. In the new digital society, this old research method that pre-existed the emergence of the new digital environment has been digitized to carry out its valuable activity in doing science. In this chapter, the secondary analysis for digitized data is illustrated. Thanks to the growing availability of datasets digitized on the web, the scholars of social well-being use the secondary analysis to inquiry this phenomenon through a cross-national perspective. The authors present the empirical study of World Love Index, in which the utility of the secondary analysis in finding and selecting valid indicators of social well-being is experienced.
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Secondary Analysis For Digitized Data

“Secondary data analysis concerns the analysis of previously collected, available and systematically organized data, having individual or aggregate unit of analysis, coming from one or more statistical sources, with the aim of answering a defined research question regardless of the purposes for which the data are originally collected” (Biolcati-Rinaldi and Vezzoni, 2012, p. 16).

The peculiarity of this research method is analyzing already existing data which have previously been collected by an/other researcher/s (Hyman, 1972; Corbetta, 2003). This brings many advantages in doing social research: “savings in relation to resources, in terms of time, money and personnel. To begin with, using data collected by someone else means that the data is available relatively quickly. The researcher does not have to go through the long and costly processes of obtaining funding, designing, and implementing their own survey, or paying for a sampling frame, conducting fieldwork, data preparation and data cleaning. The main cost in undertaking secondary analysis is that of finding the data” (Devine 2003, p. 285).

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