Meaning & use
secondary data
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountabletechnical
Information that was gathered by someone else for a different purpose and is now used in new research.
Grammar: No plural and no 'a' before it: say 'secondary data is useful', not 'a secondary data'.
Patterns
- use secondary data
- analyze secondary data
- secondary data from something
- collect secondary data
For her thesis, she used secondary data from government health surveys.
Secondary data is often cheaper to obtain than running your own experiments.
The team compared their findings with secondary data published by the World Bank.
Common combinations
- collect secondary data
- Researchers collected secondary data from hospital records going back ten years.
- secondary data analysis
- His secondary data analysis showed a clear link between diet and heart disease.
- a source of secondary data
- Census reports are a common source of secondary data for economists.
- rely on secondary data
- When time is short, many students rely on secondary data instead of doing fieldwork.
Synonyms and how they differ
- existing data
- A broader term for any information already recorded, whether or not it was collected for research.
- published data
- Focuses on information that has appeared in journals or reports, not on who collected it or why.
Opposites
Word family
- primary data noun
- Information you collect yourself for your own specific study.
- dataset noun
- A collection of related data, often stored electronically.
Commonly confused: secondary data or secondhand data?
secondary data vs secondhand data
This is not a standard academic term; use 'secondary data' in research contexts.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'secondary data' correctly?
Choose one answer.
Option 1 is correct because secondary data means information originally collected by others. Option 0 describes primary data (collected directly). Option 2 is wrong because 'secondary data' is uncountable and does not take 'a'. Option 3 is too absolute; secondary data can be reliable depending on the source.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “secondary data”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.