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| Guidelines for Informing Policy via Data CHAPTER 4 - DEVELOPING INDICATORS AND OTHER STATISTICS FROM PRE-EXISTING DATA (page 3)
4.2.3 United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD)
The United Nations Statistics Division is an especially rich resource for researchers intending to find or collect data. It has both a free-access and a subscriber-only archive. Within the freely-accessible archive is information on all of the national censuses and links to the web sites of national statistical offices when they are available. Additional information freely available at the United Nations web site includes economic data, Millennium Development Goals indicators, and additional social indicators. Additional data and indicators are free after a registration process. More information is available at the United Nations Statistics Division web site.
For those researchers who determine that they must collect their own data, the United Nations Statistical Division has prepared a series of manuals on best practices for data collection. Those manuals are available via the UNSD Methods and Classifications web site.
4.3 SUMMARY
Pre-existing data can be an excellent resource for the development of statistics and indicators if they are of good quality and appropriate to a researcher's goals. They may reduce or eliminate the need for a new data-collection project, or they may help strengthen an argument based on a newly collected set of data. But sometimes there simply aren't data already available that can be used to answer the research question of interest. In that case, a data-collection project must occur. Best practices for data collection from human populations will be discussed in the next several chapters of this manual.
4.4 RECOMMENDED READING
Ball, P. and Harrison, A., "Asking and Answering Hard Questions: Technology in the Service of Human Rights." China Rights Forum, 2006, vol. 2
- An article highlighting the use of pre-existing data sources, in some cases in combination with new data.
Ball, P., Spirer, H.F., and Spirer, L., Making the Case:
Investigating Large-scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, 2000.
- Detailed and technical discussions about creating databases from pre-existing qualitative human rights violations data.
Boslaugh, S., Secondary Data Sources for Public Health: A Practical Guide (Practical Guides to Biostatistics and Epidemiology), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2007.
- Use of pre-existing quantitative health data in a new analysis for which the data were not initially collected.
de Vaus, D., Analyzing Social Science Data: 50 Key Problems in Data Analysis, Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, 2000.- A detailed resource on the coding and analysis of qualitative social science data.
Dueck, J., Guzman, M. and Verstappen, B., HURIDOCS Events Standard Formats: A Tool for Documenting Human Rights Violations, HURIDOCS Advice and Support Unit/Secretariat, Versoix, Switzerland, 2001. - An example of how pre-existing qualitative human rights data might be coded and entered into a database.
Dueck, J., Guzman, M., and Verstappen, B., Micro-thesauri: A Tool for Documenting Human Rights Violations, HURIDOCS Advice and Support Unit/Secretariat, Versoix, Switzerland, 2001. - An example of how pre-existing qualitative human rights data might be coded and entered into a database.
Human Right Data Analysis Group, Controlled Vocabulary Definition (accessed 31 March 2007). - An example of how coding can be used to transform qualitative data into quantitative data.
Kiecolt, K.J., and Nathan, L.E., Secondary Analysis of Survey Data. Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, 1985.
- This resource discusses the use of existing quantitative (survey) data in a new analysis for which the data were not initially collected.
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