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

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.