Video Transcript
Daniel and Benjamin are two friends
who want to know if their classmates like math as they do. Daniel makes a questionnaire and
hands it out to his classmates, while Benjamin asks his teacher to give him the
results of the report conducted last year on the class’s performance in math. Who collected primary data and who
collected secondary data?
To help us answer this question,
let’s remind ourselves of what we mean by primary and secondary data. First, primary data is new
information that’s collected and organized directly by the researcher. For example, questionnaires and
interviews would give us primary data. By these means, new information
would be collected firsthand. By contrast, secondary data is
public or existing information that is collected by others, not by the researcher
themselves, for example, data from websites, newspapers, journals, or other sources
where the researcher has not directly collected the data themselves.
We can think of primary data as
data that’s collected firsthand. And another way to think about
secondary data is as data that’s collected secondhand. We’ll also sometimes see this
referred to as historic data.
Now here, we know that Daniel and
Benjamin both want to find the answers to the same question, that is, whether or not
their classmates like math. But they collect the data that will
help them answer this question in different ways. We’re told that Daniel makes a
questionnaire and hands it out to his classmates, whereas Benjamin asks his teacher
to give him the results of a report from last year.
Now, comparing their two methods
with our two types of data, primary and secondary, we see that Daniel’s method —
that’s making a questionnaire and collecting and organizing the answers from his
classmates himself — means he’s collecting primary data, that is, data collected and
organized directly by the researcher. And Daniel is the researcher. Benjamin, on the other hand, is not
directly collecting and organizing his data. He’s receiving the data from his
teacher. So, Benjamin’s data comes
secondhand via a middleman or -woman, that is, someone else who collected the
data. And so, Benjamin’s data is
secondary data. That is, it was not collected by
the researcher himself, where this time the researcher is Benjamin.
Our final answer then is that
Daniel collected primary data, while Benjamin collected secondary data.
