Define the Distinctions Between Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources in a Secondary Search

Individual Assignment

October 10, 2011

Individual Assignment

Chapter 7: 2. Define the distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources in a secondary search.

Primary sources are part of the academic research for what every topic he or she studies and by what sources him or her collect information. Such as articles, books, or even letters written by different people of creditability and interview of someone in that field of study through lectures are speeches. With scholars and primary sources, he or she searches for updated data material that has not yet reported by other scholars. Sometimes the data is not well reported or it is interpreted in a different way or an error in the reports by other scholars, which or, secondary sources.

Secondary sources are studies that usually consist of studies, which evaluate, interpret, analyze, and are critical of primary sources. They are events that account for data that have already occurred and are sources of primary sources. Secondary sources make data accessible through assessing and distributing of data. In doing this scholars can determine what other scholars have reported on any given research topic and scholars compare data.

Tertiary sources do the digesting and compiling of primary and secondary sources. Such material that come from textbooks and reference materials are a form of tertiary sources, if their primary purpose list, repackage ideas, or summarize. This source would be dictionaries and the encyclopedias.

5. Some researchers find that their sole sources are secondary data. Why might this be? Name some management questions for which secondary data sources are probably the only ones feasible.

Secondary data is the sole source available for researchers. Secondary data can be a tough source to use in research, but there are several instances that can cause secondary data to be the only sources available. Compilations of data are categorized as secondary sources because it made up of information interpreted for a purpose. Another reason is the time in which he or she is researching. This may also be the situation for those researching historical events. Reference books may be the only sources available if the historic events have happened very far in the past or there are no primary resources available any longer. Time and type of information researched play a direct role in this situation.

Some examples of management questions for which secondary data sources are probably the only ones feasible are as follows (Ganly, 2010).

* What are the differences between company sales in the months of December and January?

* What is the average revenue of the company in the past three years?

* What is the amount of returning customers in the past three years?

7. What problems of secondary data quality must researchers face? How can they deal with them?

With secondary data quality, the problems that occur should be important to every researcher to deal with problems that they will encounter and how best to deal with them. The problems that researchers will face is verification and determining the validity of the secondary sources that a researcher choices to use. Secondary data is just that, it is data that, anyone can post information in which some of it will not be credible, but just opinions from different people. This is why it is very important to research in-depth to discover if the secondary data is collected is credible, trustworthy, accurate, and valid. To evaluate secondary sources a researcher must consider the purpose, scope, authority, and audience the information is collected on (Cooper & Schindler, 2006). With any secondary data one must also understand the problems that it presents and how best to deal with bias in analysis and results.

Chapter 8: How does qualitative research differ from quantitative research?

Using a qualitative research method can produce differing data because the means of interpretation differ. Quantitative must produce the same data because the systems of analysis used for quantitative data use equations that can cater to specific data. To understand