Writing and communication researchers are in the early stages of developing procedures for reusing and maximizing the analytical potentials of qualitative data. Contributing to this effort, we critically reflect on our methodological decision-making process in developing innovative procedures for cross-analyzing two distinct studies. Our reflection responds to the need for published guidance on how to undertake methodological adaptation, the lack of which limits opportunities for other researchers to develop new study procedures to address complex problems. By discussing how and why we made particular methodological choices and adaptations in our collaborative study of faculty and doctoral student writers, we propose collaborative secondary data analysis as a fruitful avenue for qualitative writing researchers and show its potential to enact richer and more equitable research designs.

This article investigates the learning trajectories of graduate students and early career faculty - a group we refer to as emerging scholars. Taking a developmental perspective, our mixed-methods study employs surveys and interviews to understand emerging scholars' writing needs and experiences. This research is significant because although literature suggests emerging scholars struggle with new writing practices, perceptions, and identities, researchers rarely take a developmental perspective on the learning needs of emerging scholars, which ultimately limits access to the educational enterprise and perpetuates a gatekeeping culture in higher education. Further, no studies that we know of consider graduate student and faculty writers' needs in relation to one another. In this article, we present an innovative method for cross-analyzing data from these two groups in ways that reveal recurring/diverging features of lifelong writing development. Our preliminary findings reveal connections and variations in the needs and experiences of these two groups that could inform pedagogy, programming, and institutional policy geared toward graduate student and faculty writers. Finally, we discuss methodological implications for studying groups of writers with proximate developmental relationships and explain how future applications of our method will contribute to research on writing development across the lifespan.