Secondary Research

Secondary Research is the use of information and data that already exists.
There are many ways of collecting secondary research, some examples of this are:
Reading books and magazines, searching the Internet and also taking notes from existing research studies.
Companies such as The National Readership Survey conduct primary research and then sell on the findings to other media companies who then use it as secondary research.

http://www.barb.co.uk/
The above link is from the 'Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board' website which is responsible for providing the official measurement of UK television audiences.

As with any kind of research, there are Advantages and Disadvantages.
- An example of an Advantage, is that as the research has already been conducted by another organisation/person, so it is less time consuming.
- Also, it is easy to access - in today's age, more or less everybody has access to some form of research, whether that be off of the Internet, or from books and magazines.
- As the research has already be conducted, it is usually cheap/free for you to look at this research yourself.

- An example of a disadvantage of using secondary research is that it is not always relevant to your needs. For instance, you could be looking at research that was conducted with an age group of 15-20 year olds, where as you're looking for information on people ages 16 and under.
- Secondly it could be out of date which would be of no use to a fast changing market.