What is secondary data, and why is it important? Find out in this post.
Within data analytics, there are many ways of categorizing data. A common distinction, for instance, is that between qualitative and quantitative data. In addition, you might also distinguish your data based on factors like sensitivity. For example, is it publicly available or is it highly confidential?
Probably the most fundamental distinction between different types of data is their source. Namely, are they primary, secondary, or third-party data? Each of these vital data sources supports the data analytics process in its own way. In this post, we’ll focus specifically on secondary data. We’ll look at its main characteristics, provide some examples, and highlight the main pros and cons of using secondary data in your analysis.
We’ll cover the following topics:
- What is secondary data?
- What’s the difference between primary, secondary, and third-party data?
- What are some examples of secondary data?
- How to analyse secondary data
- Advantages of secondary data
- Disadvantages of secondary data
- Wrap-up and further reading
Ready to learn all about secondary data? Then let’s go.
1. What is secondary data?
Secondary data (also known as second-party data) refers to any dataset collected by any person other than the one using it.
Secondary data sources are extremely useful. They allow researchers and data analysts to build large, high-quality databases that help solve business problems. By expanding their datasets with secondary data, analysts can enhance the quality and accuracy of their insights. Most secondary data comes from external organizations. However, secondary data also refers to that collected within an organization and then repurposed.
Secondary data has various benefits and drawbacks, which we’ll explore in detail in section four. First, though, it’s essential to contextualize secondary data by understanding its relationship to two other sources of data: primary and third-party data. We’ll look at these next.
2. What’s the difference between primary, secondary, and third-party data?
To best understand secondary data, we need to know how it relates to the other main data sources: primary and third-party data.
What is primary data?
‘Primary data’ (also known as first-party data) are those directly collected or obtained by the organization or individual that intends to use them. Primary data are always collected for a specific purpose. This could be to inform a defined goal or objective or to address a particular business problem.
For example, a real estate organization might want to analyze current housing market trends. This might involve conducting interviews, collecting facts and figures through surveys and focus groups, or capturing data via electronic forms. Focusing only on the data required to complete the task at hand ensures that primary data remain highly relevant. They’re also well-structured and of high quality.
What is secondary data?
As explained, ‘secondary data’ describes those collected for a purpose other than the task at hand. Secondary data can come from within an organization but more commonly originate from an external source. If it helps to make the distinction, secondary data is essentially just another organization’s primary data.
Secondary data sources are so numerous that they’ve started playing an increasingly vital role in research and analytics. They are easier to source than primary data and can be repurposed to solve many different problems. While secondary data may be less relevant for a given task than primary data, they are generally still well-structured and highly reliable.
What is third-party data?
‘Third-party data’ (sometimes referred to as tertiary data) refers to data collected and aggregated from numerous discrete sources by third-party organizations. Because third-party data combine data from numerous sources and aren’t collected with a specific goal in mind, the quality can be lower.
Third-party data also tend to be largely unstructured. This means that they’re often beset by errors, duplicates, and so on, and require more processing to get them into a usable format. Nevertheless, used appropriately, third-party data are still a useful data analytics resource. You can learn more about structured vs unstructured data here.
OK, now that we’ve placed secondary data in context, let’s explore some common sources and types of secondary data.
3. What are some examples of secondary data?
External secondary data
Before we get to examples of secondary data, we first need to understand the types of organizations that generally provide them. Frequent sources of secondary data include:
- Government departments
- Public sector organizations
- Industry associations
- Trade and industry bodies
- Educational institutions
- Private companies
- Market research providers
While all these organizations provide secondary data, government sources are perhaps the most freely accessible. They are legally obliged to keep records when registering people, providing services, and so on. This type of secondary data is known as administrative data. It’s especially useful for creating detailed segment profiles, where analysts hone in on a particular region, trend, market, or other demographic.
Types of secondary data vary. Popular examples of secondary data include:
- Tax records and social security data
- Census data (the U.S. Census Bureau is oft-referenced, as well as our favorite, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Electoral statistics
- Health records
- Books, journals, or other print media
- Social media monitoring, internet searches, and other online data
- Sales figures or other reports from third-party companies
- Libraries and electronic filing systems
- App data, e.g. location data, GPS data, timestamp data, etc.
Internal secondary data
As mentioned, secondary data is not limited to that from a different organization. It can also come from within an organization itself.
Sources of internal secondary data might include:
- Sales reports
- HR filings
- Annual accounts
- Quarterly sales figures
- Customer relationship management systems
- Emails and metadata
- Website cookies
In the right context, we can define practically any type of data as secondary data. The key takeaway is that the term ‘secondary data’ doesn’t refer to any inherent quality of the data themselves, but to how they are used. Any data source (external or internal) used for a task other than that for which it was originally collected can be described as secondary data.
4. How to analyse secondary data
The process of analysing secondary data can be performed either quantitatively or qualitatively, depending on the kind of data the researcher is dealing with. The quantitative method of secondary data analysis is used on numerical data and is analyzed mathematically. The qualitative method uses words to provide in-depth information about data.
There are different stages of secondary data analysis, which involve events before, during, and after data collection. These stages include:
- Statement of purpose: Before collecting secondary data, you need to know your statement of purpose. This means you should have a clear awareness of the goal of the research work and how this data will help achieve it. This will guide you to collect the right data, then choosing the best data source and method of analysis.
- Research design: This is a plan on how the research activities will be carried out. It describes the kind of data to be collected, the sources of data collection, the method of data collection, tools used, and method of analysis. Once the purpose of the research has been identified, the researcher should design a research process that will guide the data analysis process.
- Developing the research questions: Once you’ve identified the research purpose, an analyst should also prepare research questions to help identify secondary data. For example, if a researcher is looking to learn more about why working adults are increasingly more interested in the “gig economy” as opposed to full-time work, they may ask, “What are the main factors that influence adults decisions to engage in freelance work?” or, “Does education level have an effect on how people engage in freelance work?
- Identifying secondary data: Using the research questions as a guide, researchers will then begin to identify relevant data from the sources provided. If the kind of data to be collected is qualitative, a researcher can filter out qualitative data—for example.
- Evaluating secondary data: Once relevant data has been identified and collates, it will be evaluated to ensure it fulfils the criteria of the research topic. Then, it is analyzed either using the quantitative or qualitative method, depending on the type of data it is.
You can learn more about secondary data analysis in this post.
5. Advantages of secondary data
Secondary data is suitable for any number of analytics activities. The only limitation is a dataset’s format, structure, and whether or not it relates to the topic or problem at hand.
When analyzing secondary data, the process has some minor differences, mainly in the preparation phase. Otherwise, it follows much the same path as any traditional data analytics project.
More broadly, though, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using secondary data? Let’s take a look.
Advantages of using secondary data
It’s an economic use of time and resources: Because secondary data have already been collected, cleaned, and stored, this saves analysts much of the hard work that comes from collecting these data firsthand. For instance, for qualitative data, the complex tasks of deciding on appropriate research questions or how best to record the answers have already been completed. Secondary data saves data analysts and data scientists from having to start from scratch.
It provides a unique, detailed picture of a population: Certain types of secondary data, especially government administrative data, can provide access to levels of detail that it would otherwise be extremely difficult (or impossible) for organizations to collect on their own. Data from public sources, for instance, can provide organizations and individuals with a far greater level of population detail than they could ever hope to gather in-house. You can also obtain data over larger intervals if you need it., e.g. stock market data which provides decades’-worth of information.
Secondary data can build useful relationships: Acquiring secondary data usually involves making connections with organizations and analysts in fields that share some common ground with your own. This opens the door to a cross-pollination of disciplinary knowledge. You never know what nuggets of information or additional data resources you might find by building these relationships.
Secondary data tend to be high-quality: Unlike some data sources, e.g. third-party data, secondary data tends to be in excellent shape. In general, secondary datasets have already been validated and therefore require minimal checking. Often, such as in the case of government data, datasets are also gathered and quality-assured by organizations with much more time and resources available. This further benefits the data quality, while benefiting smaller organizations that don’t have endless resources available.
It’s excellent for both data enrichment and informing primary data collection: Another benefit of secondary data is that they can be used to enhance and expand existing datasets. Secondary data can also inform primary data collection strategies. They can provide analysts or researchers with initial insights into the type of data they might want to collect themselves further down the line.
6. Disadvantages of secondary data
They aren’t always free: Sometimes, it’s unavoidable—you may have to pay for access to secondary data. However, while this can be a financial burden, in reality, the cost of purchasing a secondary dataset usually far outweighs the cost of having to plan for and collect the data firsthand.
The data isn’t always suited to the problem at hand: While secondary data may tick many boxes concerning its relevance to a business problem, this is not always true. For instance, secondary data collection might have been in a geographical location or time period ill-suited to your analysis. Because analysts were not present when the data were initially collected, this may also limit the insights they can extract.
The data may not be in the preferred format: Even when a dataset provides the necessary information, that doesn’t mean it’s appropriately stored. A basic example: numbers might be stored as categorical data rather than numerical data. Another issue is that there may be gaps in the data. Categories that are too vague may limit the information you can glean. For instance, a dataset of people’s hair color that is limited to ‘brown, blonde and other’ will tell you very little about people with auburn, black, white, or gray hair.
You can’t be sure how the data were collected: A structured, well-ordered secondary dataset may appear to be in good shape. However, it’s not always possible to know what issues might have occurred during data collection that will impact their quality. For instance, poor response rates will provide a limited view. While issues relating to data collection are sometimes made available alongside the datasets (e.g. for government data) this isn’t always the case. You should therefore treat secondary data with a reasonable degree of caution.
Being aware of these disadvantages is the first step towards mitigating them. While you should be aware of the risks associated with using secondary datasets, in general, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
7. Wrap-up and further reading
In this post we’ve explored secondary data in detail. As we’ve seen, it’s not so different from other forms of data. What defines data as secondary data is how it is used rather than an inherent characteristic of the data themselves.
To learn more about data analytics, check out this free, five-day introductory data analytics short course. You can also check out these articles to learn more about the data analytics process: