Define The Distinctions Between Primary, Secondary, And Secondary Sources In A Secondary Search

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Week 2 Assignment
Jim Watson
Professor William Sunday
July 23, 2012

Chapter 5 Discussion Questions

2. Define the distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources in a secondary search. Primary sources are information formed of raw data without any interpretation that has not been filtered by any secondary company, and because of this, the primary source is highly authoritative. Secondary sources are the interpretation of primary data received. Textbooks, newspapers, news casts are considered forms of secondary sources to where they gathered their information and filtered or interpreted it from the primary source. Any reference material will be considered a secondary source because they are filtering the original source of the information which is the primary source. Tertiary sources are interpretations of secondary sources, being from internet searches, bibliographies, etc. Tertiary sources are things being searched for to gather the information. All of these sources are not of equal value. These sources will have a better value from the others, such as primary having more value than secondary, and secondary having more value than tertiary.
3. What problems of secondary data quality must researchers face? How can they deal with them? The problems that researchers face using secondary data are purpose, scope, authority, audience and format. Documents should be looked over carefully for their projected purpose, scope of the research, the author's bias and background, their limits, reviews by peers and publishers because the quality of the data is directly associated with the above factors. Researchers need to know their audience and the purpose of the data in order to know what kind of information they are looking to gather. Dealing with the problems they are faced with, researchers would have to figure out what they missed when looking over all documents.

Chapter 7 Discussion Questions

1. How does qualitative research differ from quantitative research? Qualitative data uses texts, description of events, situations and interactions as verbal and visual constitute the data. The data is limited within interviews and/or video focus groups and taking notes during communication. Examples of qualitative data are verbal, reduced to verbal codes and human analysis following computer or human coding. On the other hand, quantitative data