Conferences

The data from past and present day sample surveys are made more and more easily accessible and better and better documented by the great Social Science Archives. Together they provide an enormous amount of potentially useful information on social life that may be at least as important as the secondary data sources from formal (governmental) registers. The connection of independent surveys can potentially increase our knowledge compared to a single survey, thereby stimulating new research without having costs for a new data collection. The main uses of these survey data for social science research will be discussed, along with a number of methodological difficulties the secondary researcher may encounter. More specifically, this presentation will outline three possible ways of how linking independent surveys can be used to answer substantial research questions in the social sciences: (a) linking surveys for analyses at the aggregate (regional, cohort etc) level, (b) connecting surveys to incorporate contextual effects in individual-level analyses, and© combining surveys to estimate individual relationships that are not available in a single data source.