What Is The Difference Between Primary Research And Secondary Research?

The first phase of strategic research that is data collection includes two chief aspects.  The first aspect of data collection is secondary research and the second aspect of data collection is primary research.  While primary research is research from scratch, where every step of the research process has to be accomplished in order to collect data, secondary research is another case.  It is actually the study and exploration of all those facts, figures and findings that are already researched and organized in the same line of topics.  Basically secondary data gives a past analysis of the area of concern that is being researched while primary data that is obtained by conducting primary research gives a more contemporary and current picture of the same area.  There could be a possibility of many or no changes in both types of data.  However the chances are greater that there will be many changes in the secondary and primary data.  An analytical comparison between the two sets of findings could also contribute a great deal in enabling the researcher gain a more comprehensive understanding of the respective subject area that he is researching for.

Primary research is the first hand research done, which is original, the data you collected by your self by interacting with people. Primary research can be done through meetings, interviews, by focusing groups, and surveys. The students read all the text by them selves but not that they take help from already made reports. Whereas Secondary Research describes information which you gathered through already studies reports, surveys, from already done interviews, from literature, publications, and broadcast media. Secondary research is much easier to gather than primary research.

In the research process the researcher needs relative information about its topic of research. For this purpose the researcher conducts unstructured interview, structure interview and library research to define the problem more specifically and evolve a theory, delineating possible variable that might be influence on the problem. Certain types of information such as background details of the company can be gained from available published records like the web side of the company its archives and other sources. Other types of written information such as company policies, procedures and rules can be obtained from organization records and documents. Data gathering such existing sources are called secondary.

In other words we can say that the secondary data is data which is already publish or collected by any other person or organization. We also say that the secondary data its process & refine data. The secondary data is easily available on net, books, in different articles etc. in other type of data such as the perception and attitudes of employees are best obtained by talking to them, by observing event, people, and objectives or by administrating questionnaire to individuals. Such data gathers for research from the actual site of occurrence of events it's called primary data. In other words the primary data is fresh hand data its mean primary data the researcher generated by its self by conducting the interview, questioner, sampling our group discussion.

When a researcher carries out a research in any field like business research, he has to collect data. There are two main sources of data which are Primary research and Secondary research. Primary research is the one in which the researcher collects the data on his own like by conducting interviews, surveys, questionnaire, focus groups discussions and through various other means. On the other hand secondary data is the one in which data is collected from the work of an existing researcher or information is take from already existing databases. This is the main difference between two types of data researches. Secondly, in a secondary research data is available while in primary research, the researcher can be the first one to explore the topic. Thirdly, secondary research requires sources of all of the ways through which data is collected while in primary research only methodology of data collection is mentioned.  

Primary research start from scratch-everything has to be done before data can be collected

Secondary research is the study of the data collected

Primary research is basic research and secondary goes into more detail on the topics found from the primary data.