What does the term secondary use mean? Give an example.

Secondary data is data collected by someone other than the user, for purposes other than those of our particular research study. For example, if a government department has conducted a survey of, say, family food expenditures, then a food manufacturer might use this data in the organisation's evaluations of the total potential market for a new product. Similarly, statistics prepared by a ministry on agricultural production will prove useful to a whole host of people and organisations, including those marketing agricultural supplies.
Common sources of secondary data for social science include censuses, surveys, organizational records and data collected through qualitative methodologies or qualitative research. Primary data, by contrast, are collected by the investigator conducting the research.
Secondary data analysis saves time that would otherwise be spent collecting data and, particularly in the case of quantitative data, provides larger and higher-quality databases than would be unfeasible for any individual researcher to collect on their own. In addition to that, analysts of social and economic change consider secondary data essential, since it is impossible to conduct a new survey that can adequately capture past change and/or developments.
No marketing research study should be undertaken without a prior search of secondary sources (also termed desk research). There are several grounds for making such a bold statement.
· Secondary data may be available which is entirely appropriate and wholly adequate to draw conclusions and answer the question or solve the problem. Sometimes primary data collection simply is not necessary.

· It is far cheaper to collect secondary data than to obtain primary data. For the same level of research budget a thorough examination of secondary sources can yield a great deal more information than can be had through a primary data collection exercise.

· The time involved in searching secondary sources is much less than that needed to complete primary data collection.

· Secondary sources of information can yield more accurate data than that obtained through primary research. This is not always true but where a government or international agency has undertaken a large scale survey, or even a census, this is likely to yield far more accurate results than custom designed and executed surveys when these are based on relatively small sample sizes.

· It should not be forgotten that secondary data can play a substantial role in the exploratory phase of the research when the task at hand is to define the research problem and to generate hypotheses. The assembly and analysis of secondary data almost invariably improves the researcher's understanding of the marketing problem, the various lines of inquiry that could or should be followed and the alternative courses of action which might be pursued.


· Secondary sources help define the population. Secondary data can be extremely useful both in defining the population and in structuring the sample to be taken. For instance, government statistics on a country's agriculture will help decide how to stratify a sample and, once sample estimates have been calculated, these can be used to project those estimates to the population.(http://www.fao.org/docrep)
A clear benefit of using secondary data is that much of the background work needed has been already been carried out, for example: literature reviews, case studies might have been carried out, published texts and statistic could have been already used elsewhere, media promotion and personal contacts have also been utilized.
This wealth of background work means that secondary data generally have a pre-established degree of validity and reliability which need not be re-examined by the researcher who is re-using such data.
Furthermore, secondary data can also be helpful in the research design of subsequent primary research and can provide a baseline with which the collected primary data results can be compared to. Therefore, it is always wise to begin any research activity with a review of the secondary data (http://en.wikipedia.org).