 Dear students, in this module, we are going to talk about the use of secondary data in our research design. Collecting data from existing sources such as government reports, archives, surveys, or census, we can use that secondary data to analyze and to interpret and to draw different conclusions. That doesn't mean that we cannot use any kind of data which is already existing, and we have to collect the data by ourselves. So, in the field of sociology, social scientists or sociologists, it is not bound that only primary data will be used, but secondary data, as long as the data is coming from reliable or credible sources, you can use that secondary data. So evaluating the quality and reliability of secondary data, and then using the data to test the research hypothesis or answer the research question. So, like in the conventional survey method, we develop hypotheses and test them by the help of primary data, so that the same mechanism can be adopted in secondary data. The only difference is that the data you already have will be available, you build hypotheses on that data, and by drawing your findings from there, you can draw conclusions. Analyzing the data using the statistical and qualitative methods will also depend on the nature of your secondary data, if it is in the form of statistics, then obviously you will use the statistical method, and if it is in the form of content, then you can do a content or qualitative content analysis. The way the other methods have strengths and weaknesses, there are also strengths and weaknesses of secondary data, if it is important for you to ensure its reliability, if its reliability is not there, then the data will have a limitation, similarly, using the secondary data, the hypothesis building, we have to take care of certain limitations in it. For example, the demographic trends of Pakistan, we can analyze them through Pakistani census, now the census data is not possible to collect for individuals or smaller organizations, so we can use the census data of Pakistan as a secondary data, and we can explore different demographic trends from that, and we can test different hypotheses based on their basis and draw our conclusions.