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Secondary data refers to data that is collected by someone other than the primary user. [1] Common sources of secondary data for social science include censuses, information collected by government departments, organizational records and data that was originally collected for other research purposes. [2]
Among genealogists, a primary source comes from a direct witness, a secondary source comes from second-hand information or hearsay told to others by witnesses, and tertiary sources can represent either a further link in the chain or an analysis, summary, or distillation of primary and/or secondary sources. In this system, an elderly woman's ...
Secondary research is contrasted with primary research in that primary research involves the generation of data, whereas secondary research uses primary research sources as a source of data for analysis. [1] A notable marker of primary research is the inclusion of a "methods" section, where the authors describe how the data was generated.
Secondary sources are accounts at least one step removed from an event or body of primary-source material and may include an interpretation, analysis, or synthetic claims about the subject. [2] Secondary sources may draw on primary sources and other secondary sources to create a general overview; or to make analytic or synthetic claims. [3] [4]
Gathering data can be accomplished through a primary source (the researcher is the first person to obtain the data) or a secondary source (the researcher obtains the data that has already been collected by other sources, such as data disseminated in a scientific journal).
A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or it may be a document created by such a person. A secondary source is one that gives information about a primary source. In a secondary source, the original information is selected, modified and arranged in a suitable format.
Primary, or "statistical" sources are data that are collected primarily for creating official statistics, and include statistical surveys and censuses. Secondary, or "non-statistical" sources, are data that have been primarily collected for some other purpose (administrative data, private sector data etc.).
Many sources contain a combination of primary/secondary or secondary/tertiary material, sometimes all three. A source that is secondary in one context may be primary in another (e.g. a history book is a secondary source for the facts it reports, but a primary source for what the author wrote about an event).