Question

Given the enormity of secondary data availability, research options have been modified over the years; after conducting some basic search using scholarly articles, briefly outline such changes and how they have affected traditional survey and experimental research. Your response should include sound arguments and examples to further extend the discussion

how can I put in a work cited page for this answer.

Answer 1

Marketing information must be timely, organised, useful and in a simple form if it is to ease decision making. It should also be easily manipulated to satisfy the changing and ad hoc requirements of management for information.

Technology is one of the aspects that have been known to have an effect on market research. The changes have affected both the traditional surveys and the experimental research. Technology offers several exciting benefits to researchers in operations management, including lower costs, broader distribution, potentially higher response rates, and improved accuracy of data entry, faster survey turnaround times and randomized ordering of items. While technology has provided many benefits to traditional surveys and experimental research, in that it is time and money saving, there are some disadvantages in the ways that it has changed traditional survey and experimental research.

The biggest advantage of using secondary data is economics. Someone else has already collected the data, so the researcher does not have to devote money, time, energy and resources to this phase of research. Sometimes the secondary data set must be purchased, but the cost is almost always lower than the expense of collecting a similar data set from scratch, which usually entails salaries, travel and transportation, office space, equipment, and other overhead costs. In addition, since the data is already collected and usually cleaned and stored in electronic format, the researcher can spend most of her time analyzing the data instead of getting the data ready for analysis.

A second major advantage of using secondary data is the breadth of data available. The federal government conducts numerous studies on a large, national scale that individual researchers would have a difficult time collecting. Many of these data sets are also longitudinal, meaning that the same data has been collected from the same population over several different time periods. This allows researchers to look at trends and changes of phenomena over time.

A third important advantage of using secondary data is that the data collection process often maintains a level of expertise and professionalism that may not be present with individual researchers or small research projects. For example, data collection for many federal data sets is often performed by staff members who specialize in certain tasks and have many years of experience in that particular area and with that particular survey. Many smaller research projects do not have that level of expertise, as a lot of data is collected by students working part-time.

A major disadvantage of using secondary data is that it may not answer the researcher’s specific research questions or contain specific information that the researcher would like to have. It also may not have been collected in the geographic region or during the years desired, or the specific population that the researcher is interested in studying. Since the researcher did not collect the data, he has no control over what is contained in the data set. Often times this can limit the analysis or alter the original questions the researcher sought to answer.