SECONDARY ANALYSIS

    While this chapter is devoted almost exclusively to how you might design and conduct a survey, most survey analyses today are conducted on data collected by someone else.  In large part, this reflects the high costs of conducting surveys.  Analyses of data previously collected by someone else are referred to as secondary analysis.

    An excellent example of secondary analysis can be found in the General Social Survey (GSS), an annual or biannual, national survey of American adults, sponsored by the federal government, and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.  Asking hundreds of questions of a sample of thousands of people, the GSS is designed for the expressed purpose of generating massive data sets for analysis by social researchers.

    In addition, data libraries or data archives around the country and the world maintain and distribute other survey data, such as the data collected by Gallup or Roper Polls.