The role of conceptualization and operationalization in the use of secondary data

With the recent advancements in data mining and availability of large data repositories, a vast amount of collected data are reused as secondary data sources. Although the use of secondary data provides many new opportunities for knowledge discoveries, it requires a careful analysis of the primary research process, namely, the original purpose, conceptualization and operationalization of the variables, and the specific context of data collection. This paper focuses on the interpretation of the secondary data as the evidence of existence or non-existence of real-world phenomena. Our discussion is based on the extended fuzzy logic approach, FLe, proposed by Lotfi Zadeh for the modeling of real-world problems. We demonstrate the necessity of an explicit model for the conceptualization and operationalization process using real-life examples from ecological and medical research.