A little exercise to see the difference between these two types of data sources.

Depending on what we are looking to collect, the places to find them are sometimes varied. We have by example libraries, books, reports and of course the Internet. These places are suitable for data sources secondary. The primary data sources are datas collected by the researcher. They come from diferent collection instruments such as questionnaire, interviews or focus-groups talks. These tools belong respectively to the quantitative method and to the qualitative method of research and information gathering.

Let’s look at what is happening: In your residential area, which may be a district or your district of residence, you have located thirty (30) gas stations. That is, you have an on-site count of these infrastructures by taking the geolocation coordinates of each unit.

Now, you go to your city library or you read a scientific article mentioning the number of stations in your area. This number is 30. This is a secondary source data collection.

We find that we arrive at the same result? 30 gas stations.
Question: Is there any difference between the 30 gas stations collected in the secondary source data and the 30 collected by the way of primary source?

Some tools for collecting data from primary sources and data from secondary sources.

Bibliographic guidelines

Oliver Parks. The Difference Between Structured, Unstructured & Semi-Structured Interviews
https://www.oliverparks.com/blog-news/the-difference-between-structured-unstructured-amp-semi-structured-interviews

Kallio, H, Pietila, A, Johnson, M and Kangasniemi, M. Systematic methodological review : developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide.
https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/39197/1/jan13031%20Martin%20Johnson%20June%202016.pdf

Eileen Fischer and Marie-Agnès Parmentier (2010) , »Doing Qualitative Research With Archival Data: Making Secondary Data a Primary Resource« , in NA – Advances in Consumer Research Volume 37, eds. Margaret C. Campbell, Jeff Inman, and Rik Pieters, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 798-799 .