Week 4 EOC: Primary and Secondary Research

-Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using secondary data.

“Secondary data are data that have been gathered and recorded previously by someone else for purposes other than those of the current researcher.” The principal benefit of secondary data is that they are almost always cheaper to acquire than primary data. In general they can be gained swiftly and may provide info not accessible to the researcher any other way. This would be a great advantage because receiving a lot of the information that is needed without much extra work is a good first step for the researcher or be used to support the research that has been performed separately.  The disadvantage of secondary data is that they were not anticipated particularly to meet the researcher's requirements. The researcher must scrutinize secondary data for accuracy, bias, and reliability. One of the ways to do this is to cross-check an assortment of existing sources. Thank God for Google.

-Define surveys and describe the type of information that may be gathered in a survey

“A survey is defined as a method of collecting primary data based on communication with a representative sample of individuals.” Associates of the delegated sample are known as respondents. The expression sample survey is often used because a survey is estimated to obtain a representative sample of the target demographic. “Typically, surveys attempt to describe what is happening, what people believe, what they are like or to learn the reasons for a particular marketing activity.” The archetypal survey is part of a descriptive research plan with the aim of measuring knowledge, product awareness, brand usage behavior, judgments, attitudes, opinions, purchasing behavior, and identifying personality traits of target markets. “Because most survey research is descriptive research, the term survey is most often associated with quantitative findings.” The factual information that is found in some surveys may also be qualitative.