Secondary Research

Secondary research is where the information you collect isn't your own. It's somebody else's research that you then use to provide your research. For example, if I wanted to find out the ratings for a show on television, I would use the BARB (Broadcasters Audience Research Board) website, which shows statistics for televisions programs. There information is collected by hard facts and statistics. By using somebodys elses survey, this would be secondary research as you wouldn't have researched it yourself. Secondary research is extremely easy to find and usually free or very low cost.

Below is a video that describes what secondary research is:






If you were to go on the BARB website to get statistics, this would be classed as secondary research as you didn't collect and find that research yourself.  This is the difference between primary and secondary. If you were to of collected that information by yourself, then it would be primary. It's primary research for the people who actually put those statistics together in the graph they did and if they did the research to finding them out.

In my opinion I think both primary and secondary research should be done, secondary first so that you can find out what people have gone for and liked a lot before and then your own research, primary, so that you can conduct say a survey so you can meet the requirements people want already and then get their feedback.