Market Research-Exploratory Research Design: Secondary Data

In this session we focused on secondary data.  There are two forms of secondary data:

• Internal
• External

Examples of internal include:

• Invoices
• Shipping records
• Sales reports
• Customer service reports

External sources include:

• Reports produced by government departments
• Reports produced by market research firms
• Directories

What are the advantages and disadvantages of secondary data

Advantages

1. Cost-in some cases there is a little or no cost involved in accessing secondary data-i.e. CSO statistics from the CSO website
2. Completedness-data can be more detailed than primary research data
3. Timeliness-secondary data can be accessed quite quickly from the Internet

Disadvantages

1. Data bias-there is the possibility that the same data can be interpreted differently
2. Data accuracy-how was the data collected
3. Is the data useful?

We will focus on observation next week.