ABSTRACT
When secondary analysis is used to examine an organisation’s records, it becomes a powerful tool to help practitioners to reflect systematically on their practice. To be effective, it is important to have organisational support and infrastructure to develop ways to identify and collect the right data, and to help practitioners with the more sophisticated methods of data analysis available. Secondary analysis is an excellent source of descriptive material in that records may be assessed to provide a descriptive profile of the client source. Another research method that is very useful is content analysis: the analysis of some form of communication—written, audio or visual—for trends or patterns, and the style and techniques used. A particularly important method for social workers is observation. Observation allows us to overcome some of the limitation inherent in other methods. Structured observation is a method of systematically observing certain predefined behaviours and using a predetermined set of observation categories.
