Question

What are the major problems in using secondary data sources, such as birth or death certificate data? What, if anything, can the evaluator do about these problems?

Answer 1

Secondary data sources like birth and death certificateshave their own advantages and disadvantages. As the secondary data records already exists the time and money to collect and investigate the datas are saved. But they have their own disadvantages over primary data.

Disadvantages:

• Uniformity: as these datas are collected by other person they could be altered for some reasons.
• Availability: sometimes these records may not be present. Like every individual do not have their birth and death certificates.
• Lost: sometimes the data required could be very old and thus not preserved and gets lost or deleted.
• Method of collectiob: as the data collected was not by you it could be collected through some insufficient methods or for some other reasons that do not fullfill yours.
• Quality of data collected- as the data collection was done by some third party they could gave jeopardise with the quality of data.

If in any case you require to use the secondary data then the first thing to do is critically review the data. Secondly evaluate the data source and the method of collection of data. If you find the reviews and evaluation of data satisfying then you can use them.