RESEARCH DESIGN IN GEOGRAPHY  3000W

With the ever-growing expansion of global knowledge geographers like many other scientists both human and physical have begin to face an “information explosion” (Ebdon, 1985). The readily available written information and numerical data today is increasing at an accelerating rate. This has lead to the necessity for summaries of these large data sets showing the concise measurements of their attributes. Human and physical geography can be seen as two different disciplines one been primarily focussed on qualitative data and one quantitative data respectively; both been equally reliant and interested within secondary data sources. The contention as to why this is the case is outlined below.

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It can be noted that secondary data within the research discipline may be defined as “data which has not been collected with the specific research question in mind” (Emanuel and Egenvall, 2014). It can be seen as data which has previously been collected by somebody else however is effortlessly available; Secondary data was once a branch of primary data (Vartanian, 2010). It is seen as common source for academic disciplines to use within research projects either been obtained from quantitative or qualitative sources.

Secondary data as an aspect of scientific disciplines has come about due to the global widespread transition from paper to digital (Gomez and Jones, 2010). Nowadays datasets can be created, analysed and distributed worldwide digitally. Digital secondary data is often structured within databases and organised as tables which can be analysed. An example of this is weather records available online within the NOAA – National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) whereby annual to daily summaries are available as structured datasets. This climatic data online provides free accessible