Video Transcript
List two disadvantages of secondary
data.
We can begin by recalling that
secondary data is public or existing information which is collected and organized by
others. Some example types of secondary
data sources are newspapers, websites, journals, and government documents. One disadvantage of secondary data
is that we cannot control who the data is collected from. For example, the data might be
collected from a sample with different characteristics for the population that we
are studying. This could even be something like
the secondary data contains data from different age groups that we are not
interested in. We also commonly find that
secondary data is often outdated. The information in the secondary
data source may have been collected several years previously.
We could summarize both of these
disadvantages by saying that the data may be irrelevant to our study. We can also list the disadvantage
that we can’t control how secondary data is collected and organized. The data may not be an accurate
representation of the population we’re interested in. In general, however, the two main
disadvantages of secondary data is that they can be irrelevant and unreliable, and
so we can give the answer as irrelevant and unreliable.
