Is it common, or fallible, to use data from other research studies?

How common is it for a research study based on, say, user observation, to try to gather vignettes of users captured as data during other research studies? It seems that it would be more practical to gather lots of existing evidence from other studies, rather than re-capturing very similar observations independently.

And if it isn't common, why not? What are the pitfalls of using evidence gathered from other studies, to drive my own research?

For example, rather than record 1000 new hours of user observations, wouldn't it be more pragmatic to try to obtain the pre-existing video recordings of users from other studies? (This is assuming the pre-existing recordings would serve the purpose of the new study.)