ABSTRACT
Disaster stakeholders, including practitioners and researchers, gather enormous amounts of primary data throughout the disaster cycle. This inherently multidisciplinary data is stored in various formats and locations by any number of local, state, tribal, regional, territorial, national, and international agencies and organizations. The data, when available and accessible, has potential for informing evidence-based disaster politics, policy, practice, and research in the ever-critical work of improving human outcomes in disasters. Disaster researchers face multiple challenges in curating and analyzing relevant data necessary for building the evidence base. The challenges include data sourcing, where and how to identify relevant data sources, data management, how to extract and merge the data to align with a selected conceptual framework, and how to conduct data analysis. In this chapter, I will address these issues by drawing on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, extant literature, and my experience navigating some of these challenges and leveraging existing resources. I discuss the process of conducting research using large secondary data from global datasets to generate insight on a global public health disaster, the findings of which have import for addressing current and future global hazard events.
