Qualitative Secondary Analysis in Practice: An extended guide

The aim of this paper is to share some of the ideas which guided and evolved during the Timescapes Secondary Analysis (SA) project, and some of the lessons we learned on the way. In it we hope to offer an extended and practical guide to those undertaking secondary analysis of qualitative data, but we also hope it will be of interest to other qualitative data analysts (primary as well as secondary). In our discussion we also describe our approaches to working across data sets, and working with longitudinal data. This extended guide evolved in the writing of a brief Timescapes Series Methods Guide on Secondary Analysis. In seeking to provide a resource for secondary analysts there seemed value in offering a more expansive and more fully exampled account of lessons we have learned which we hope may be of interest to prospective secondary analysts. It may be, too, that in reflecting on issues confronting secondary analysts, primary researchers depositing the data for possible re-use will think in some detail about the kinds of metadata and guidance they might make available. Whilst we have a range of secondary analysis project outputs and publications describing our strategies and analyses these are by their nature diverse. We hope that bringing together some of our approaches in one document might offer an informative account of a secondary analysis undertaking ‘in practice’.