What is secondary research?

• A. Research that uses existing information from sources like books, articles, and websites.
• B. New, firsthand data collected via experiments.
• C. Only visual data from films.
• D. Data collected from surveys you design.

Answer: (A)

Secondary research means looking at information that already exists, gathered by someone else. It uses sources like books, academic articles, reports, and websites to answer a question or understand a topic without collecting new data yourself. This helps you get a broad background quickly and usually at lower cost. It’s different from primary research, where you design and carry out your own data collection, such as experiments or surveys you run. So the option describing existing information from books, articles, and websites is the best fit. The other ideas describe creating new data or focusing on a narrow type of data, which is not what secondary research is.