Secondary Analysis in Exploring Family and Social Change: Addressing the Issue of Context

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of context in conducting secondary analysis and draws out the particular epistemological, methodological, practical and ethical challenges associated with the re-use of historically specific, contextually bound archived datasets. Focusing on the topic of change and continuity in family life, it outlines our efforts to design a method of comparing contemporary data on parents with accounts collected in the 1960s. We discuss the contextual complexities and constraints we encountered in attempting to construct a viable approach to evaluating social change through comparative historical analysis, and we describe how we sought to address these issues. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0501444