Primary Research and Secondary Research

Most students are familiar with secondary research. Secondary research is the kind of research you do in the library or online. When one is conducting secondary research, they are looking for sources of information that other experts, writers, and thinkers wrote about a subject. We call this kind of research ‘secondary’ because it relies on others to have collected the research and written about it.

This is in contrast to primary research. Primary research is conducted, not in the library or online, but in the world. When conducting primary research, a research will use one or more tools, or methods, to collect data directly from people or the things they are studying rather than from books or texts already written about those things or people. One example of this is the kind of research a journalist does. A journalist may look up information that has been written about the news they are investigating, but they will also go out and talk directly to other people about that news–seeking out actual witnesses on the scene or officials in charge. In the job of a journalist, this is especially important since their subject, the news, involves late breaking events that may not have been written about yet.

Note that although primary research and secondary research constitute different kinds of data collection, they go hand in hand. Most researchers will conduct both secondary research, collecting relevant information on their subject that has already been written and published, and primary research, collecting new data and evidence that no one else has collected before.

Primary Research Methods

What isn’t made evident in popular culture is that scientists, scholars, and researchers can actually choose to engage in a variety of different forms of primary research, depending on their field of study and the kind of knowledge they want to discover. Other examples of primary research methods include observation, interviews, focus groups or panels, surveys, and ethnography.

Below some common methods of primary research are defined:

Observation

This method involves going out in the world and watching, using your five senses to collect data.

Here are other ways observation might be used:

• One might observe a group or organization, exploring how business is conducted or how people in the group communicate
• One might observe artwork or other man-made or natural objects in order to interpret that artwork.
• One might view and record observations from several people’s Facebook pages to examine how this kind of social media commonly gets used.
• One might observe memorial spaces in public parks at various times in a day to record how the public makes use of those spaces.

Observation is great for inquiry in which you either can’t ask questions (for instance, a monument or painting won’t talk back) or because you want to collect information on how something works without interfering by participating yourself or asking questions for which you may or may not receive the best answers.  At the same time, observation means you can only observe one or a few examples, thus it is hard to say that anything you observed is true for most or all situations.

Interviewing

Interviews involve one-on-one sessions with individuals, in which you ask open-ended questions. You collect their broad, open-ended answers much like you do with observation, without coming to conclusions or assumptions about what the person is saying. Only afterward do you analyze the questions and relate it to the subject and your research question(s).

Interviews are quintessentially qualitative, leading to complex understandings and viewpoints of one or a small group of people.  Generally, the answers are in depth and nuanced because the respondent has some time to construct his or her answers carefully and add clarification if needed.

Another good thing about interviews is that they allow you develop specific questions tailored to the individuals you are interviewing and to change your questions or come up with new questions based on the respondent’s previous answers.  In this way, the interview becomes sort of a conversation; the information you collect adjusts and changes according to what you discover at that moment.  Other the other hand, interviewing limits the number of people from whom you can collect information, so it isn’t as good for coming to conclusions about what most or all people think.

Planning Interview Research

You can conduct interviews in person or via writing (email, chat, instant message, etc.) or virtually, through Zoom or Skype. Interview data can be collected via the interview respondent’s writing, by written notes you take as the interviewer, or sound-recording or video-recording. Part of planning an interview requires you to decide how you’ll conduct the interview and how you’ll collect the answers.

In general, an interview is conducted face-to-face or live over the phone. This approaching to interviewing allows you to adjust questions and come up with new ones as the conversation proceeds and new ideas emerge. It can be challenging when it comes to collect data, though. Will you take notes to record the respondent’s answers? If so, you may need to halt the interview at times to get the information recorded or ask the respondent to confirm what they said. Will you record the interview? In this case, you must get permission from the respondent to do so and you must take time to listen to the interview later in order to take notes on it. Something similar can also be done via a teleconferencing tool like Skype or even through instant messaging.

Interviews can also be conducted via email, where you send the set of questions to the respondent and they answer them on their own time. This eliminates the need to plan a time to meet and talk to the respondent. It might also lead to longer, more in-depth answers since the respondent will have the time to think about and write down their responses. What’s more, once the respondent replies, all the data is already collected in the email they send back. On the other hand, an email interview does not allow an interviewer to rephrase questions or add new ones. If a respondent didn’t understand a question, there isn’t a way to rephrase to get a better answer.

To conduct interviews of multiple respondents, you also will need to come up with a common set of questions to ask each person so that the same kind of information can be collected and compared. These questions must be phrased in such a way that they are understandable to the people you are interviewing. In addition, you must plan  ahead by contacting participants to interview, set up times and places to meet them, etc.

Surveys

Surveys involve developing a series of short, easy to answer, multiple choice or multiple answer questions that are distributed to a large number of people. Usually, surveys are used to collect quantitative data; a researcher will total up each kind of answer for each question and calculate the mean (average), median (middle), and mode (most common) of those answers. As well, other statistical analysis can be done on survey data to mathematically determine how significant or remarkable certain answers are. In any case, the numerical data collected from a survey is then interpreted, looking for answers they provide to research question(s).

Surveys are great for collecting information about large groups of people, since you can distribute surveys widely, collect them as a group, quickly total up answers, and do calculations.  Because of this, you can begin to make conclusions based on how representative your survey sample is of the larger group you are investigating.  A good survey sample means that you can assume that even people you didn’t survey will likely answer in the same way as those you did survey.

On the other hand, you cannot collect very complex information through a survey since the people who take the survey are automatically limited in the kinds of answers they can give and the questions and answers have to remain general enough to refer to and be understandable by all people.

Planning Survey Research

Surveys will require a set of survey questions applicable to the research question(s), identification of a sample population, a way to get surveys out to that sample population, and time to collect returned surveys and calculate the data.

It can actually be quite tricky to phrase the questions and answers in a survey effectively. Since all the question need to be understandable to a large number of people, a researcher must be careful to phrase the questions in simple terms and provide explanations for more complex ideas or terms that respondents might not understand. Since most questions in a survey are multiple choice, researcher also needs to be sure they have provided all the possible answers respondents may want to give to each question, or even have an “Other” option in case the answer a respondent might give isn’t listed. Some of the questions asked might be demographic questions – questions about respondents’ age, gender, race,political or religious affiliation. These questions help a researcher determine whether the people they are surveying matches they population they want to collect data on.

There are various ways to distribute surveys: a paper form that is passed out and collected, an in-person survey in which questioned are asked and responses are collected face-to-face, or an online form that is distributed via email or some other digital media. If using online tools to write and distribute a survey, you can use tools like freeonlinesurveys.com or surveymonkey.com.

Below is a table breaking down on each method of primary research and their major features.

Works Cited

Miller-Cochran, Susan, and Rochelle Rodrigo. The Wadsworth Guide to Research. Cengage Learning, 2009.

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