Last Updated on October 14, 2026 by Karl Thompson
What are the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to research the academic progress of pupils in schools?
This challenging question came up in the Methods in Context section of the 2021 AQA A-level sociology paper, Education with Theory and Methods (7192/1), as Question 05. (The paper is dated June 2021, but because the summer exams were cancelled it was actually sat in the autumn 2021 series.) According to the examiners’ report, students found it difficult. Large numbers focused only on quantitative secondary data rather than both quantitative and qualitative, and many answers made generalisations about secondary data without picking up on the specifics of different types of data, let alone APPLYING these to the topic in the question, which was pupils’ academic progress.
So this applied research methods topic is probably worth going over in some depth! Remember, just because a question has come up before doesn’t mean it can’t come up again, especially as the examiners know it’s one students find hard.
New to these questions? Start with How to Answer Methods in Context Questions, which explains what the question asks, how it’s marked and how to plan it.
The question and item
The question was:
Applying material from Item C and your knowledge of research methods, evaluate the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to investigate the academic progress of pupils in schools. (20 marks)
The item is summarised in my own words below. The original wording is in the question paper on the AQA website.
Item C made these points:
- On the topic: pupils from different groups make different amounts of academic progress, and sociologists try to identify these patterns and explain them. Progress is affected by factors both inside and outside school.
- On the method: schools produce both quantitative secondary data, such as exam results, and qualitative secondary data, such as progress reports and samples of pupils’ work. Much of this is publicly available, which makes it practical to use. HOWEVER, some of it may not be accessible, and data on pupils’ progress may be presented selectively.
Notes towards an answer
The item suggests that you should focus on both quantitative and qualitative forms of secondary data, so do both, and say which is which.
And with Methods in Context questions you need to at least try to apply the strengths and limitations of the data to the actual topic in the question: academic progress!
Secondary quantitative data to research academic progress
This topic is partly dealt with in this post: Official Statistics on Educational Achievement.
Official statistics include exam results and SATs results. They have excellent representativeness, because they cover practically every pupil, and they are usually easy to compare between schools and groups of pupils. However, with education statistics there are several different measures of progress, which can get confusing. GCSE grading has also changed from letters (A* to G) to numbers (9 to 1), which makes comparisons over time more difficult.
However, official statistics don’t tell us WHY pupils make different amounts of progress. League tables can show you trends, and correlations between schools, but not what is going on in pupils’ lives, in or out of school, that explains them.
Schools also record their own quantitative data in the form of internal tests and assessments (not official statistics). These can give more insight than official statistics, because they track individual pupils more often, but there are access issues: schools don’t have to share them.
Secondary qualitative data to research academic progress
Secondary qualitative data will give you more insight into WHY pupils make different amounts of progress. It includes Ofsted reports, school reports on pupils’ progress, pupils’ written work, and even personal documents such as diaries.
Written work in particular can give you an insight into the quality of the feedback pupils get and how much effort they are making, while personal documents can tell you what is going on in pupils’ lives outside school.
The main problem with both of these is access. Exercise books and pupil reports belong to the school and to the pupils, so you would need permission from several gatekeepers (the head teacher, teachers, parents, and the pupils themselves), and personal documents such as diaries would be even harder to get hold of.
This topic is covered in more depth in this post: Assessing the Usefulness of Secondary Qualitative Data to Research Education. NB: that post is broader than this topic, and some of the sources it mentions may not be useful for measuring academic progress.
For secondary data in general, see The Strengths and Limitations of Secondary Data.
What the examiners said
The AQA’s report on this exam series said this was one of the weakest questions on the paper. In summary:
- Many students assumed “secondary data” meant only official statistics, or only secondary quantitative data, and ignored the qualitative sources the item pointed them to.
- Many made sweeping claims about secondary quantitative data and applied them to all secondary data, such as “secondary data is reliable but low in validity”, which often wasn’t accurate.
- Weaker answers spent a lot of time on other research methods, which earned little credit unless they were used to highlight a strength or limitation of secondary data.
- Stronger answers compared different sources, such as official statistics against the qualitative documents found in schools. Some explained the problems of getting access to school documents such as exercise books and pupil reports, given the permissions needed from different gatekeepers.
- Only a very small number applied the strengths and limitations of secondary data to academic progress specifically. The examiners’ example: league tables can show trends and correlations between schools, but they can’t tell you why pupils make progress or fail to, or what their experiences outside school are.
So the lesson here: treat quantitative and qualitative secondary data separately, compare them, and keep tying each point back to progress.
Sources and signposting
For more Methods in Context questions with answers, see How to Answer Methods in Context Questions. For more on exams, see my exams and essay writing page.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com