There has been a significant growth in the infrastructure for archiving and sharing qualitative data, facilitating reuse and secondary analysis. The article explores some issues relating to ethics and epistemology in the conduct of qualitative secondary analysis. It also offers a critical discussion of the importance of engaging with the situatedness and contextually embedded nature of data, and ways in which contexts (including research designs and disciplinary and methodological assumptions) are themselves embedded in primary data. I illustrate some strategies for addressing these matters with reference to analyses of two different areas, drawing on research conducted as part of ESRC Timescapes, and highlight some issues for development research.

Qualitative secondary data analysis: Ethics, epistemology and context

Energy poverty is widely understood to be a complex and multi-faceted problem, with a range of drivers. In this paper we draw on secondary qualitative data on energy poverty from the UK, as well as conceptual thinking informed by the capabilities approach, to explore a previously understudied facet of energy poverty: social relations. We focus particularly on how relationships with family, friends, agencies and distant others impact on people’s ability to cope with energy poverty. We find that the connection between social relations and energy poverty is recursive: good social relations can both enable access to energy services, and be a product of such access. This connection is also shaped by structural factors, such as access to a range of resources, membership of particular collectivities, the need to perform social roles, and the common reasons used to explain poverty and energy use. Our work suggests that attempts to address energy poverty need to take into account the quality of people’s social relations, as well as the potential impact of policy and practice on social relations, given that people rely on their friends and families for information support and advice, on key agency workers for access to resources, and are also constrained by discourses of poverty.

Energy poverty and social relations: a capabilities approach

Qualitative research is recognized as an important method for including patients' voices and experiences in health services research and policy-making, yet the considerable potential to analyse exi...

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Using secondary analysis of qualitative data of patient experiences of health care to inform health services research and policy

Objective To explore clinician perceptions of involvement in delivery of self-management approaches. Setting All healthcare settings. Design EBSCO, Scopus and AMED databases were searched, in July 2013, for peer-reviewed studies in English reporting original qualitative data concerning perceptions of clinicians regarding their involvement in or integration of a self-management approach. Of 1930 studies identified, 1889 did not meet the inclusion criteria. Full text of 41 studies were reviewed by two independent reviewers; 14 papers were included for metasynthesis. Findings and discussion sections were imported into Nvivo-10 and coded line-by-line. Codes were organised into descriptive themes and cross-checked against original sources to check interpretation, and refined iteratively until findings represented an agreed understanding. Studies were appraised for quality. Results Delivering self-management in practice appeared to be a complex process for many clinicians. The issue of ‘control’ arose in all studies, both in the qualitative data and authors’ interpretations. The first theme: Who is in control? —represented ways clinicians talked of exercising control over patients and the control they expected patients to have over their condition. The second theme:  Changing clinician views —reflected what appeared to be an essential transformation of practice experienced by some clinicians in the process of integrating self-management approaches into the practice. A range of challenges associated with shifting towards a self-management approach were reflected in the third theme, Overcoming challenges to change . Tensions appeared to exist around forming partnerships with patients. Strategies found helpful in the process of change included: dedicating time to practice reciprocity in communication style, peer support and self-reflection. Conclusions A consistent finding across studies is that ‘control’ is a key feature of how self-management is viewed by clinicians. They described challenges associated with the paradigm shift required to share or let go of control. Future research should identify whether strategies described by clinicians are key to successful self-management.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/5/e007413.full.pdf

Who is in control? Clinicians’ view on their role in self-management approaches: a qualitative metasynthesis

© 2018 British Educational Research Association Raising the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds progressing to higher education has been a key policy objective for successive governments in the UK since the late 1990s. Often this has been conceptualised as a problem with their ‘aspirations’, with the solution being seen as the provision of ‘aspiration-raising’ activities to promote higher education to those thought to have the potential to progress. Recent large-scale studies cast strong doubt on this hypothesis by demonstrating that aspirations are not generally low, that different social groups have similar levels of aspiration and that school attainment accounts for nearly all the differences in participation rates between social groups. This article draws on data from a national project exploring efforts to widen participation across two generations of practitioner-managers in England, focusing on their conceptualisations of the field and their constructions of ‘successful’ activities. It uses the lens of ‘possible selves’ (Markus & Nurius,) to argue that too much policy emphasis has been placed on the aspirations of young people, rather than either their academic attainment or their expectations, which are shaped by the normative expectations of the adults surrounding them. In addition, the more expansive concepts of widening participation that were present a decade ago have become less common, with a shift towards activities with a clear role in institutional recruitment rather than social transformation. The article concludes with alternative suggestions for policy and practice.

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Challenging discourses of aspiration: The role of expectations and attainment in access to higher education

The current paper takes as a focus some issues relating to the possibility for, and effective conduct of, qualitative secondary data analysis. We consider some challenges for the re-use of qualitat...

/pdf/qualitative-secondary-analysis-and-social-explanation-33m89186ql.pdf

Qualitative Secondary Analysis and Social Explanation

The article illustrates some of the strategies we are developing in the secondary analysis of Timescapes data and seeks to draw some general lessons for qualitative data analysts. We focus on three different areas of work. Across all of these we examine the potential explanatory value of working with data in a comparative way, and engage with some challenges presented by contextual specificity in the way qualitative data are generated. In the first area we consider the issue of how we situate qualitative data with reference to diversity across the population, and use an example of working between a single qualitative Timescapes data set and survey data. Understanding how qualitative data are situated offers a framework for internal comparison which maps onto wider diversity. In the second area we consider the outcome of bringing together primary researchers whose comparison of project data, as secondary analysts, allow them to ‘hear silences’ and, therefore, re-interrogate their own data within a revised ...

Timescapes secondary analysis: comparison, context and working across data sets

The expansion of higher education in the UK has been accompanied by ongoing class related inequalities in expectations about, and access to, university. In the context of detailed research into middle-class and working-class experiences and difference, there have been calls for more detailed analysis of internal class diversity, and for complicating the class dichotomy. This is particularly important for understanding the experiences of prospective first generation students. Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study, this article offers a qualitative longitudinal analysis of young people's expectations about going to university, as these evolve over the teenage years, from 14 to 18. We analyse the experiences and expectations of young women with different parental class and educational backgrounds. We explore the interplay of parental expectations, school, teacher and friendship group influences through the teenagers' biographies. The qualitative longitudinal analysi...

Teenage expectations of going to university: the ebb and flow of influences from 14 to 18

This paper is a companion piece to Irwin and Winterton (2011). The current paper takes as a focus some issues relating to the possibility for, and effective conduct of, qualitative secondary data analysis.i We consider some challenges for the re-use of qualitative research data, relating to distance from the production of primary data, and related knowledge of the proximate contexts of data production. With others we argue that distance and partial knowledge of proximate contexts may constrain secondary analysis but that its success is contingent on its objectives. So long as data analysis is fit for purpose then secondary analysis is no poor relation to primary analysis. We discuss some examples of secondary analysis in practice. We further discuss debates regarding research contexts, with reference to practical resources, and to evolving historical contexts of research. We argue there is much to be gained from more critical reflection on a set of „middle range‟ issues regarding how contextual saliences are conceptualised, or assumed, within methodologies and extant data sets. In developing our ideas about secondary analysis we argue for more critical reflection on how effective knowledge claims are built. It is this agenda which we develop in the companion working paper, with specific reference to building effective secondary analysis across Timescapes data sets.

Debates in Qualitative Secondary Analysis: Critical Reflections

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the reuse of extant qualitative data and a remarkable expansion in the possibilities for doing so with the exponential growth in electronic data storage and archiving capacity. Research funders have sought to encourage reuse and data sharing through investing in archiving infrastructure and requiring research bids to include proposals for depositing and sharing data (Van den Eynden et al. 2011, Neale and Bishop 2012). The secondary analysis of large data sets is a standard practice in quantitative research, but the secondary analysis of qualitative data entails unique challenges. There has been some controversy over the logic of undertaking secondary analysis of qualitative data. The orientation of qualitative research to context, specificity and meaning, and the embeddedness of data in the purposes of the primary researchers, in their disciplinary and theoretical concerns, and in the specific contexts through which they generate data makes their secondary analysis a potentially fraught undertaking. Alongside epistemological issues and methodological questions are a range of ethical challenges. These issues are widely discussed and addressed in detail elsewhere (e.g. Bishop 2006, 2009, Mason 2007, Hammersley 2010, Irwin and Winterton 2012, Mauthner and Parry 2012). Most concur that secondary analysis has a role to play both in enhancing sociological understanding, as well as a potentially valuable role in informing policy.

Mandy Winterton

Papers

Qualitative Secondary Analysis and Social Explanation

Timescapes secondary analysis: comparison, context and working across data sets

Teenage expectations of going to university: the ebb and flow of influences from 14 to 18

Debates in Qualitative Secondary Analysis: Critical Reflections

Gender and Work-Family Conflict: A Secondary Analysis of Timescapes Data