Understanding Definition of Data, Information, and Their Roles inResearch

Reasearch Design Methods When you decide to conduct a research, you must prepare yourself to strugle with data and information. As the main purpose of research is to gain a factual information in order to answer particular questions, there is no wonder that all research activities will not be separated from data. Therefore, in this material we will discuss about the roles of data in a research. But, before we talk further about data and information in research, I think it would be better for us to understand what is meant by data and information.

We can define data as a set of numbers or letters or maybe symbol that represents certain quantity or entity or even specific category. Data is fact that we could collect from a fieldwork activity. We will use this data as our raw material in order to answer our research questions. In other side, information is data that has been proceed so that it can give us a meaning about something. We can say that information is the output from data we have input before. You can see the relationship between data and information as below:

According to picture above, we illustrate data as our raw material to produce information which actually is our research conclusion. However, that data will only give no-meaning conclusion if we do not proceed it well. We can process the data by using statistical equation, especially for you who use quantitative research approach will need to do statistical analysis to process your data. From data processing step, we will get some findings (a meaning information) which will be used to develop our research conclusion.

In research, there are two type of data: data who collected directly from the source of information and secondary data.

Definition of Primary Data

According to Alreck (1995), primary data is data or facts those are collected directly from respondent in particular research project to meet the goals of the project. In research, primary data plays crucial role as the core of the research, because we will need this data to build the conclusion. The answer for our research questions is gained from nowhere than data. To get the findings we must first process this data using certain analytical techniques – for a quantitative approach research, you will be required to have a good statistical skill.

Definition of Secondary Data

Beside primary data, there is other type called secondary data. Secondary data is type of data that was originally used for other purposes, but you can take this data to complete your research. Researchers usually take secondary data from a database provided by their own preious research, other researchers’ findings or from external data providers, such as the Central Bureau of Statistics and syndicate companies. These data are provided for general purpose and you must also process them first. In a research study, secondary data widely used to develop the theoretical basis and help us explain the results of the research. To learn more about secondary data roles in research you can read its advantages and limitations below.

a. The Advantages of Secondary Data

• Secondary data can helps us identify our research problem. We often have difficulty in making the formulation of research problems. To overcome this matter, we usually need to find inspiration from a variety of reading materials. This various sources of literature is called secondary data.


• Secondary data helps us in selecting research approach. Have you ever experienced a situation where you already know what the problem to be studied, but you do not know what approach should be use? What will you do in that situation? Maybe some of you will answer by using examples of existing research er paper to find out appropriate research methods.These sources is also included in the secondary data.


• Secondary data helps us formulate the research design, especially to identify key variables being used in research project.


• Secondary data can be used in hypotesis testing and to help us answer research questions. Although, hypothesis testing can be done by collecting primary data, but to explain more detail about the situation behind the primary data we may need other sources of information, such as other journals, research paper, etc.

b. Limitations of Secondary Data

• Secondary data usually presented in a niece topic. Consequently, it maybe not appropriate for our research project because it is too narrow.


• Secondary data originally formed for other purpose so that its nature and method used in collecting that data could be not relevan with our current research project.


• Some secondary data has low level of accuracy. It is because some researchers might use wrong methodology.

After knowing the advantages and disadvantages of secondary data you might now ask, "How do I evaluate secondary data to be used to complete the research?"

Six Criterias in Choosing An Apprpriate Secondary Data

To answer that question, you can read some six criterias for choosing an appropriate secondary data as below:

1. Spesification/ methodology : Secondary data to be used must be reliable, valid and able to generalize research problem. The source of data should be trusted sources which use scientific methodology of research.


2. Error/ data accuracy : We need to measure the acuracy of data will be used. We can compare the data from certain source to other related and trusted source to check how accurate it is.


3. Recency of data : Secondary data being used in our research project must bethe newest one. You should not use data from five years ago to explain your current research. Generally, sindicate company will routinly update their data to improve their accuracy so you can check their up-to-date data.


4. Objective : As I said before, secondary data is originally collected for other previous research project, not specifically aiming for your research project, so that the objective maybe different with your current research. This difference objective may affect on the relevancy data being used. Therefore, before we take particular data we must check the objective of that available secondary data. Choose data that match with our research objective. For example, as our research objective is to measure potential purchase of luxury good in Jakarta, we can use data on income Jakarta residents provided by the Central Bureau of Statistics.


5. The nature or content of data :Tthe nature of data evaluation criteria consists of variable, measurement unit, category, and relationship between observed variables. To enchance the use of data we need to reconfiguring data, for example, we maybe possible change the unit measurement so that the resulting data are more useful to the problem we handle.


6. Dependability : Secondary data being used should come from a real research which had conducted by other parties, or it could be from your owned previous research findings. We must not use data which based only on a subjective opinion. Data must be a fact.

Now you are are familiar with a variety of criteria to evaluate and secondary data. To complete our understanding about data, the next matter we will discuss the sources of secondary data.