The Advantages and Disadvantages of Secondary Data - Essay Example

The advantage is that all the effort that the researchers have to make to design the questionnaires and modify them to make them reliable and then distribute them among the research participants and collect them is saved. Accordingly, the cost incurred in data collection is significantly reduced. One disadvantage of secondary data is that the researcher has to rely on others’ researches and findings. In any kind of research, the reliability of information is a prime concern both for the researcher and for the audience. The researcher might want to have more reliable research than the one conducted by the previous researchers whose data is being used for the current research. “Agency records, secondary data, and content analysis do not require direct interaction with research subjects” (2011, p. 218). The secondary data does not provide the researcher with the facility to interact one-to-one with the subjects of research, and the research findings are, for the most part, a conclusion of the past researches. Hence, the “reliability, credibility, and accuracy [of the research] may not be known” (Summers, Morgan, and Summers, 2005, p. 110).