How can you do secondary research on this?

Question

How can you find out how many people get on a train at a particular time with secondary research?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Secondary research means using the research of another person. You need to look the information up on the Internet or in a library. Try the website of the train company you are studying.

Primary research would involve you counting the people getting on the train yourself.

Answer 2

By using an existing data set. This can be somebody else's research or records that already exist.

In this case, you could use data collected by another researcher if they had already done this and the data were available or you could analyse the records collected by the train company, such as passenger usage, ticket sales, etc.

Secondary research is often easier and less time consuming than primary research (where you must collect the data yourself, e.g. surveys, observation). However, you still need to understand the data and the way in which they were collected, make sure the operationalisation of the concepts is relevant to your research and understand the limits of the original methodology. Issues such as representativeness and validity remain as important, but can be harder to establish as you have not designed the research yourself.