Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Issues in the Secondary Use of Research Data

“Reduce, reuse, recycle”, a phrase familiar to us from the environmental movement, can also be used to reflect on the secondary use of research data. Secondary research refers to the use of research data to study a problem that was not the focus of the original data collection. This may be data collected for administrative, health or educational purposes, census data, or data collected as part of a previous study. This secondary analysis may involve the combination of one data set with another, address new questions or use new analytical methods for evaluation (Szabo & Strang, 1997).