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.

National Survey Data

Existing survey data may be of use depending on the sampling frame for the impact evaluation, level of representativity of the existing data, and availability of disaggregated data. National Statistics Office typically collect a wide array of nationally-representative data, such as Living Standards Measurement Surveys and censuses. International survey efforts such as the Demographic and Health Surveys [1] and Enterprise Surveys [2] are also good sources.

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