Data Types Modified from a text by Gregory Haley, Head, Electronic Data Service, Columbia University. There are many issues related to the topic of numeric data. DPLS is, of course, a library of data sets for use in secondary analysis. The researcher can be an individual or an organization, such as a news service or a research institute.
Primary data are incredibly expensive, both in time and money.
An editor of a major city newspaper estimated that he could pay a full time reporter's salary for a year for the same amount as it would take to execute a single, local public opinion poll. Polls are so expensive to conduct, in fact, that the major news services have used data collected by a single organization on which to base their exit poll reporting during elections. Understanding the process by which data are created is important for anyone doing quantitative research. We include a section on primary data in this series of documents for that reason. Data that are used by someone other than the person who collected them are referred to as secondary data .