-Relevant. -Accurate. -Sufficient. First-Hand Evidence. Evidence from personal experiences, anecdotes you have heard from others, observations, or general knowledge of events.

In newspapers, reporters write about things that have happened but most of the time they weren’t there themselves. Diaries are an example of a firsthand account and newspaper articles are an example of a secondhand account.

First person accounts are a shortcut to the direct experience and an important tool that helps address this challenge. First person accounts are especially important so that one can empathize with and gain a better understanding of the experiences of those with severe mental illness.

Primary sources help students relate in a personal way to events of the past and promote a deeper understanding of history as a series of human events. Because primary sources are incomplete snippets of history, each one represents a mystery that students can only explore further by finding new pieces of evidence.

First person accounts are an accessible, educational source for those trying to gain insight into the first-hand experience of severe mental illness. First person accounts place the illness in the context of real lives and vividly illustrate how someone’s life has changed.

The purpose of secondary sources is to interpret, or explain the meaning of the information in primary sources. Secondary sources help you to understand more about a person’s life as well as how and why an historical event happened.

Advantages: They offer a quick, easy introduction to your topic. They may point to high-quality primary and secondary sources. Disadvantages: Because of their distance, they may oversimplify or otherwise distort a topic. By rehashing secondary sources, they may miss new insights into a topic.

A major disadvantage of using secondary data is that it may not answer the researcher’s specific research questions or contain specific information that the researcher would like to have. Often times this can limit the analysis or alter the original questions the researcher sought to answer.

A clear benefit of using secondary data is that much of the background work needed has already been carried out, such as literature reviews or case studies. Secondary data can provide a baseline for primary research to compare the collected primary data results to and it can also be helpful in research design.

The benefits of secondary storage can be summarized as follows:

• Capacity. Organizations may store the equivalent of a roomful of data on sets of disks that take up less space than a breadbox.
• Reliability. Data in secondary storage is basically safe, since secondary storage is physically reliable.
• Convenience.
• Cost.

Secondary Sources

• Bibliographies.
• Biographical works.
• Reference books, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases.
• Articles from magazines, journals, and newspapers after the event.
• Literature reviews and review articles (e.g., movie reviews, book reviews)
• History books and other popular or scholarly books.

The sources of data can be classified into two types: statistical and non-statistical. Statistical sources refer to data that is gathered for some official purposes, incorporate censuses, and officially administered surveys.

In general, there are three types of resources or sources of information: primary, secondary, and tertiary. It is important to understand these types and to know what type is appropriate for your coursework prior to searching for information.

Under the main three basic groups of research methods (quantitative, qualitative and mixed), there are different tools that can be used to collect data. Interviews can be done either face-to-face or over the phone. Surveys/questionnaires can be paper or web based.

Here are some of the most common types of data collection used today.

1. Surveys.
2. Online Tracking.
3. Transactional Data Tracking.
4. Online Marketing Analytics.
5. Social Media Monitoring.
6. Collecting Subscription and Registration Data.
7. In-Store Traffic Monitoring.