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The Requirements of Secondary Analysis of Organizational Data

Keywords: secondary analysis, business and organizational data, data management, data sharing, data documentation, meta-analysis

Detailed data documentation is fundamental for secondary analysis. But many datasets of organizational studies are incompletely documented and processed. This could be shown by a meta-analysis of empirical organizational research in Germany conducted in 2011 by the German Data Service Center for Business and Organizational Data (DSZ-BO). In addition to the lack of information about the data collection process, inadequate data qualities and legal agreements often hinder the distribution of datasets to third parties and make the reuse of datasets difficult. These problems of secondary analysis are predominantly due to low implementation standards of data management during the whole data lifecycle and due to the lack of standards and tools of data documentation special to organizational research. However, data sharing is important to exploit the whole analysis potential of the datasets so that a pooling of resources can be reached. This paper focuses on the specifics of organizational data discussing the factors interfering with data sharing in organizational research and the developments necessary to improve data management and sharing.