Introduction > Planning Your Research > How Will You Collect Your Data?

How Will You Collect Your Data? Once you've confirmed your experimental design, it's worth spending some time thinking about how you're going to collect and manage your data. This is largely dependant on whether your data are primary or secondary. Primary Data In most of your University research you'll be responsible for collecting the relevant data. This is known as primary research and collecting the relevant data. The main advantage of this method is that your results are tailored to your hypotheses. This is why it's particularly important to plan your data collection so you collect the right types of data! Secondary Data Data collected by another researcher but used by you is known as secondary data. There may be many reasons why you have used secondary data and not conducted the experiment yourself. You may be limited in the time you can spend doing experimentation, your University may not have the facilities or equipment to carry out the research or you may not have had the expertise required. Using secondary data is advantageous in that you can have access to data you would not have been able to collect yourself. There are, however, disadvantages to using secondary data. You will probably be unaware of any problems encountered during the original research and these problems may have direct effects on the results. The data may have been recorded for a different purpose and therefore may not be as complete as you would have liked.

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