Primary and secondary data/information types

What are they?

  • Primary - you collect the data
  • Secondary - someone else collected the data and reported the results, information produced at least one step from the actual event that produced the original (primary) data

Examples

  • Primary - artefacts, photographs, movies, sound recordings, letters, dairies, memos, autobiographies, experimental data, eyewitness accounts, government records, research data.
  • Secondary - textbooks, encyclopaedias (including CD ROMs like Encarta), biographies, charts produced from primary data, maps, articles in a newspaper describing events/surveys not written by an eye witness/data collector, a 'doctored' photo, the census, "quotes" in newspapers

Comparison

  Advantages Disadvantages
Primary
  • You know how accurate the data is
  • You may collect data that only supports your ideas
Secondary
  • Less effort and time to collect
  • May allow a look at trends over a period of time
  • May get a lot more data that you could collect on your own
  • Might be cheaper
  • May be incomplete
  • Accuracy is unknown
  • May be out of data
  • May have been collected with a particular view in mind
  • May have been altered

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