Question

You are employed by a market research agency that has just been contracted by Woolworths in South Africa to conduct a study examining the relationship between retail crowding and shopping satisfaction. Write an essay in which you discuss the research methods you propose to employ to conduct the research. The term ‘research methods’ refers to a number of factors that need to be discussed. Please structure your essay using the following headings:

 Research approach and design;  Participants and sampling;  Measurement;  Data analysis; and  Ethical considerations.

Answer 1

Please find my answer below:

Research methods are processes or techniques used to collect data and analyze them inorder to come up with new information relating to that particular topic. Below are the research methods that will be proposed to employ inorder to conduct the research:

Research approach and design: Two main types of research approaches are Qualitative and Quantitative. Qualitative approach is where we collect and analyze the human behavior and experience, their beliefs and emotions. In the case, retail crowding and their shopping satisfaction is to be done research on and hence qualitative factors are important to be digged upon. This approach will give us an indepth idea about why people visit these retail shops and how satisfied they are in ther emotions after the shopping is done. Similarly, qualitative approach in which the data collected are converted into numerical form and analyzed to draw conclusions. This will measure the likelihood of the researcher's findings in the scale from 0 to 10. Here, number of people visiting on a weekday, weekend etc can be collected and their overall satisfaction levels are measured using numbers.

Participants and sampling: Inorder to make further progress in the research, the researcher will have to select a sample out of the population. The sample will give an indepth detail about the factors that make them chose the retail places for shopping. The sampling can be done in many ways. Either the researcher can make a group of participants by selecting people from different age groups and collect relevant data - this is called purposive sampling. Or they can do Random sampling in which certain number of participants are picked randomly without any selection criteria and used for data collection.

Measurement: Measuring the collect data is important because without which the researcher cannot interpret the data correctly and accurately. For measurement , the researcher can use four approaches - Nominal, Ordinal, Interval or Ratio to reach to a precise and sensible analysis. The nominal and ordinal measurements will give a overview but not much precision in data is provided here. On the contrary, the interval or Ratio approach will give us a more detailed and precised information about the data. Hence, in our case, just by collecting shopping satisfaction in terms of number of shops visited or number of things purchased wont be enough but we need to get more information about the price structure as well as this can be achieved by doing a ratio measurement approach.

Data Analysis and Ethical considerations are two most crucial part of any research process conducted. Data analysis involves analyzing the data collected and interpreting the conclusions that can be drawn out of them. It summarizes the findings of the researcher. Here, logical and statistical methods are used to describe, illustrate, evaluate and summarize all the data. Similarly, while conducting research, the participants should not be harmed in any way and prior written consent must be obtained from all the participants. Confidentiality of participants should be maintained well. Hence the researcher should do the research ethically.