Research Methods in Business Studies

In this chapter, we first provide a detailed discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of collecting and using secondary data, and highlight some important secondary data sources. The next section then considers the advantages and disadvantages of collecting and using primary data. The following three sections are devoted to sampling. With secondary data, the researcher is obliged to accept the data that are publicly available, and is not able to influence how the data are collected or how much data are collected. In contrast, the researcher collecting primary data needs to decide whether to survey the entire population or just a sample, to choose an appropriate sampling procedure, and to determine the sample size that will assure a satisfactory level of precision in the subsequent empirical analysis. The final two sections are then devoted to undertaking the two most common methods of primary data collection, namely questionnaire surveys and experiments.