A decade ago, secondary analysis was relatively rare outside expert research units in leading universities. Today the growth of personal computing has led to a much wider data use and the availability of new storage devices, such as CD-ROM, has led to a huge growth in the demand for and use of data. For usage of survey data to increase, effective management of the data will need to be combined with a marketing strategy. This may consist of several levels, for example promotion at international forums, workshops of users, targeted publications and training events. A further benefit of the archiving and documenting of the data is quality feedback of the whole survey process.
Wider dissemination leads to more extensive use of the whole survey.
This can bring to light inconsistencies and issues that may not have been picked up in the original processing and lead to significant quality improvements to the survey and to future surveys. Effective and standardised preparation of data for secondary analysis will often uncover ambiguous definitions, spurious data values and other errors than can lead to corrections before inappropriate conclusions are drawn from the data. The large investment in surveys is often hard to justify given budget constraints. Clearly if more productive use can be made of the existing surveys, then the return on the investment will improve dramatically. Within developed countries a major justification for some government surveys is the widespread use made of these sources by the secondary analysis.