ABSTRACT
‘Secondary research’ is a catch-all term meaning re-examination of information which has been gathered for other purposes. You may do this using ‘primary sources’ (first-hand information), ‘secondary sources’ (information others have derived from primary sources), or ‘tertiary sources’ (meta-analysis of several secondary sources). Anthropological research projects tend to rely on secondary research at every stage, including during ‘fieldwork’. Too many researchers give secondary research only second-rate consideration. This is a mistake. Anthropologists have always tended to learn a great deal more from indirect media such as archives, libraries, the web, newspapers, cultural artifacts, and film than they do from ‘primary’ face-to-face sources. Secondary research is becoming still more important as the internet becomes our main source of information (academic and non-academic, verbal and non-verbal). Secondary research requires careful planning while also itself providing key inputs into the planning process. You must think laterally about what your key search terms might be, what the most useful and efficient information sources will be, how to achieve a reasonably diverse and unbiased portfolio of sources, and how to organize the information so that a viable and valid research story emerges from it. Developing these capabilities and habits will not only help your dissertation but will help you develop crucial life skills in learning from and communicating with multiple sources in many places.
