Secondary Data Sources
Secondary data is data collected by any party other than the researcher, including administrative data from programs, geodata from specialized sources, and census or other population data from governments. Secondary data provides important context for any investigation, and in some cases (such as administrative program data) it is the only source which covers the full population needed to conduct a research project.
Impact Evaluations rely on many different sources of secondary data, such as: administrative, geospatial, sensors, telecomms, and crowd-sourcing. An important step in designing an impact evaluation is to evaluate what data sources are best suited (and which are available, given the context).
Guidelines
Administrative and Monitoring Data
Administrative data includes all data collected through existing government Ministries, programs and projects. It is a potentially rich source of data for an impact evaluation. Key challenges are: data is in paper format only (needs to be digitized), restricted access, lack of numeric identifier (or lack of common identifier with other key datasets).
JPAL provides a useful guide to using administrative data for impact evaluations.
Survey Data
The bread and butter of most impact evaluations is primary data collection; enumerators conducting personal interviews with respondents. These can be in the form of household surveys, firm surveys, school surveys, health facility surveys, etc. They can take place in-person, by telephone, or online. Data can be collected on paper with centralized data entry (Pen-and-Paper Personal Interviews (PAPI)), on paper with field data entry (Computer-Assisted Field Entry (CAFE)), or electronically (Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI)).
Geo Spatial Data
This includes data from traditional satellites, micro- and nano-satellites, and unaccompanied aerial vehicles (UAVs, e.g. drones).
Remote Sensing
This includes all data collected by sensors, and through the Internet of Things (IoT).
Telecom Data
This includes call detail records, social media data, web scraping.
Crowd-sourced Data
This includes all data collected by crowd-sourcing, often through social media or mobile apps.
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This article is part of the topic Secondary Data Sources