Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 81

All of the methods discussed thus far involve the collection of new and original data, but many sociologists engage in secondary data analysis, in which they reanalyze data collected by others. Secondary analysis can involve a wide variety of different types of data, from censuses and other surveys to historical records and old transcripts of interviews and focus groups. Until recently, obtaining and using some of these secondary data sets was laborious and time-consuming. Today, however, thousands of data sets are available online, and they can be accessed with a few keystrokes. A number of websites provide both the data sets and statistical software for looking at them in different ways (Quinton 2018).

Secondary data analysis very often involves statistical analysis of government surveys and census data. For example, researchers studying multiracial identity used data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses and found that individuals who identified as two or more races increased from 6.8 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2010 (Jones and Bullock 2013). It is not unusual for one body of data to lead to hundreds of secondary analyses. For example, the World Values Survey (WVS; www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp) is conducted in nearly 100 countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. Its seven waves have been used to produce more than 1,000 research publications in more than 20 languages. Some of this research has used the WVS to examine what social, cultural, and economic factors contribute to an individual’s happiness. Figure 2.5 shows a “happiness map” depicting levels of happiness among the citizens of various countries included in the surveys from 2010 to 2018.