Video Transcript
A social scientist wants to know
the effect of teamwork on the growth of companies. He makes a questionnaire and hands
it out to employees of 10 different companies at different growth stages. What is the type of the collected
data? Is it (A) secondary data or (B)
primary data?
To help us answer this question,
let’s remind ourselves of what we mean by primary and secondary data. Well, primary data is new
information that is collected and organized directly by the researcher. For example, questionnaires and
interviews would give us primary data. We can think of this as new
information that’s collected firsthand. There is no middle person between
the researcher and the data. Secondary data, on the other hand,
is data that is in the public domain or existing information that is collected and
organized by others. For example, data available on
websites or in newspapers, journals, or from other sources, where the data itself is
not collected directly by us, is secondary data. Another way to think of secondary
data is as second-hand data.
In this question, we want to
establish whether the data collected by the social scientist is primary or secondary
data. We’re told that the social
scientist makes the questionnaire himself and directly hands it to employees from
the different companies. Since the data is collected and
organized directly by the researcher, that is, the social scientist, we can conclude
that the type of data collected is primary data. Our answer is therefore that the
type of data is primary data, which is option (B).
