Question

What are the methods of collecting secondary data?

Answer 1

Hint: Now as the name suggests secondary data is the data which is collected by the secondary source and not the user. Hence think of all the sources where we can obtain data for analysis. This can be any publications, records etc. which are not created by the user himself but are used to obtain the data.

Complete step by step answer:
Now before understanding the methods of collecting secondary data, let us first understand what is primary data and secondary data and hence let us see how that is useful.
Now statistics is a subject in science where we collect the data and analyze them in large quantities.
Hence we can interpret and understand the data better by creating a statistical model.
Now to do this we will first need data.
This data can be anything might be the population, age of population, price of goods in a store, sales of a store. Number of admissions in a school etc.
Now mainly there are two methods of data collections. Primary method and secondary method. Now primary data is the data which is directly collected through surveys or some observations or even maybe by experiments. On the other hand secondary data is data which is not collected by the user himself but through secondary source or someone else.
Now majorly this data can be obtained by Journals, Historic documents, Newspapers, Public records, Biographies diaries etc.
For example let us consider you want to create and analyze the population of people in your country from 1990 to 2020. Let us say you want to find the average population from this. But for that you will need the population data. Now obviously you won’t be able to find this data by surveys. So we can take help from the Government's population record. We can find these records which they have calculated and use them in our analysis. Such a source is called secondary source.

Note: Now note that most of the data we use in analysis is secondary data. Since we do not actually collect the data on a larger scale. Though if we are doing a survey or an interview on a small scale we can say we are collecting primary data.