Secondary research

Secondary research is basically just collecting your desired information, looking up the information online, in books or anywehere accessible where the data is already recorded for you. This makes secondary research far cheaper and easier than primary research for the reason that no research plans and surveys etc are to be produced.

An example of secondary research is; say for example a film company needed to check how well a film did in order to decide on the creation of a second one, if they went on forums and checked various websites, reviews or charts they could gather secondary research this way.

Although secondary research can be far easier to obtain than primary research it may not cover all the elements of information that you wish to find out and it can be necessary to have information that doesnt already exist. Also the sources of the information must all be referenced and checked to make certain that it is all reliable.