Difference between Primary data and Secondary data

Difference Between

 Primary and

 Secondary data

Parameter	Primary data	Secondary data
Objective	To address the problem or opportunity of the research.	To support the problem or opportunity of other researchers.
Process	Researcher involvement is very high	Researcher collect information with little effort.
Cost	Primary data collection cost is very high	Secondary data collection cost is low.
Time	Duration to collect the primary data is long	Secondary data collected is less span of time.
Suitability	This type of data is suitable for the problem or opportunity of the researcher.	Secondary data may or may not suit the objectives of the research and problem or opportunity in general.
Originality	Original data collected from the researcher.	This data is borrowed from other researchers.
Validation	Data validation effort is very less	Data has to be thoroughly validated.
Sources	Surveys, Observations and Experiments	Internal records, Published sources and search engines.
Bias	The researcher has to eliminate the bias in the primary data	The previous researcher has already eliminated the bias , the current researcher need  not to work more on bias elimination.
Need of investigators	This type of data require a trained investigators.	There is no need of
Reliability	More reliable	Less reliable
Type of data	Quantitative in Nature	Qualitative in nature.
Control	The researcher has high degree of control	The researcher has less control
Ownership	The researcher has ownership of the data	The researcher has no ownership of the data
Relevance	The data is relevant to the problem or opportunity in the hand	The data may or may not be relevant to the problem or opportunity in the hand.

What do you mean by Primary data / Define Primary data.

Primary data is original data  collected for the objective of the research or investigation.. For instance,  Let us discuss a few objectives of the research.

• A marketing manager would like to find the customer service request rates pre-covid -19 days and post covid-19 days per month.
• A finance Manager interested to know the company’s stock price movement one month before and one month after the demonetization in India .
• Similarly, A HR manager eager to identify  new recruiting models emerged after the lock down period.

In these situations, the researcher, or an organization or an agency is collecting the data on the objective for the first time and has not collected the data from earlier published sources. 

Primary data collected either using survey method or observation method. To facilitate the method, the researcher will use questionnaire or forms or observation or peer to peer networks instruments. Further, the data may be collected by a researcher himself or by a trained interviewer. Added to this, Primary data collection utilizes either personal interview, mail interview, telephone interview or online interviews methods to collect the data. This type of research is also known as  a field research.