How to Write a Dissertation without Primary Research

It's very likely you may be doing secondary research for your dissertation, rather than primary. If this is so you, then here's the good news: secondary research is the easiest type of research! Congratulations! In a nutshell, secondary research is far simpler. So simple, in fact, that we have been able to explain how to do it completely in just 4 steps. If nothing else, secondary research avoids the all-so-tiring efforts sometimes involved with primary research. According to PhD dissertation writing services, like recruiting your participants, choose and prepare your measures, and spend days (or months) collecting your data.

Understanding Secondary Research:
So, what exactly do we mean when we say “secondary research”? To answer this question, let’s first recall what we mean by primary research. As you probably already know, primary research is when the researcher collects the data himself or herself. The researcher uses so-called “real-time” data, which means that the data is collected during the course of a specific research project and is under the researcher’s direct control. In contrast, secondary research involves data that has been collected by somebody else previously. This type of data is called “past data” and is usually accessible via past researchers, government records, and various online and offline resources.

Read More: 5 Important Concepts for Capital Budgeting Assignment

So, to recap, secondary research involves re-analyzing, interpreting, or reviewing past data. The role of the researcher is always to specify how this past data informs his or her current research. In contrast to primary research, secondary research is easier, particularly because the researcher is less involved with the actual process of collecting the data. Furthermore, secondary research requires less time and less money (i.e., you don’t need to provide your participants with compensation for participating or pay for the other costs of the research).

Advantages Of Secondary Research:
Whatever type of research you are conducting, always be aware of its strengths and limitations. If you look at the table above, you should already be able to discern some advantages of secondary research. One of the most obvious advantages is that, compared to primary research, secondary analysis is inexpensive. Primary research usually requires spending a lot of money. For instance, members of the research team should be paid salaries. There are often travel and transportation costs. You may need to pay for office space and equipment, and compensate your participants for taking part. There may be other overhead costs too.

These costs don't exist when doing secondary research. Although researchers may need to purchase secondary data sets, this is always less costly than if the research were to be conducted from scratch. Most students value another important advantage of secondary analysis, which is that secondary analysis saves you time. Primary research usually requires months spent recruiting participants, providing them with questionnaires, interviews, or other measures, cleaning the data set, and analyzing the results. With secondary analysis, you can skip most of these daunting tasks; instead, you merely need to select, prepare, and analyze an existing data set.

Moreover, you probably won’t need a lot of time to obtain your secondary data set, because secondary data is usually easily accessible. In the past, students needed to go to libraries and spend hours trying to find a suitable data set. New technologies make this process much less time-consuming. In most cases, you'll find your secondary information through online search engines or by contacting previous researchers via email.

Read More: Make Your Dissertation Writing Process Easy and Simple

A third important advantage of secondary research is that you can base your project on an outsized scope of data. If you wanted to obtain a large data set yourself, you'd need to dedicate an immense amount of effort. What's more, if you were doing primary research, you would never be able to use longitudinal data in your graduate or undergraduate project, since it would take you years to complete. This is because longitudinal data involves assessing and re-assessing a group of participants over long periods of time. When using secondary data, however, you have an opportunity to work with immensely large data sets that somebody else has already collected. Thus, you can additionally deal with longitudinal data, which may allow you to explore trends and changes of phenomena over time.

Disadvantages Of Secondary Research:
By now you may have concluded that using secondary data is a perfect option for your graduate or undergraduate dissertation. However, let’s not underestimate the disadvantages of doing secondary research. The first such disadvantage is that your secondary data may be, to a larger or lesser extent, inappropriate for your own research purposes. This is simply because you have not collected the data yourself. When you collect your data personally, you do therefore with a specific research question in mind. This makes it easy to obtain the relevant information. However, secondary information was always collected for others of fulfilling other researchers’ goals and objectives.

Thus, although secondary data may provide you with a large scope of professionally collected data, this data is unlikely to be fully appropriate to your own research question. There are many reasons for this. For example, you may be interested in the data of a particular population, in a specific geographic region, and collected during a specific time frame. However, your secondary information may have focused on a slightly different population, may have been collected in a totally different geographical region, or may have been collected a long time ago.