Deck 13: Conducting Research for Decision Makers

Question 1

Use your critical skills to evaluate a website, identifying any problems you find (e.g., false advertising, misinformation, propaganda, scams).

Answer 1

Evaluating a website:
Nowadays, a company can use a large number of web-based sources for providing information about the company. However, the information provided by the websites can sometimes be non-reliable. Thus, the information provided by such websites should be evaluated before any of its information is used by any person for important work.
Outcome:
Websites provide various useful information about a company. However, one cannot completely rely on the website in terms of completeness and accuracy. In case of a website, there is no such fixed format through which their credibility can be judged.
Accordingly, information on the website should be carefully scrutinized. Credibility issues with regard to the information provided on the website can arise on grounds of false advertising, misinformation, and scams.
In order to judge the credibility of the information provided on the website, one must scrutinize the website on such grounds as purpose of the information, details of the persons providing the information, sources for cross-checking the information and the overall structure of the website.
Thus, it can be concluded that t he information that is provided by websites does not have a good credibility but they can be evaluated if are to be used for some specific purpose.

Question 2

Using your critical thinking skills to supply any missing facts you may need, develop a plan for research by using interviews for these problems.
a. Grow More Company sells children's clothes. The company has seen an increased rate of employee turnover this past year, and your supervisor wants you to find out why.
b. Jacob's Hardware Store recently sent a survey out to get feedback on its customer service. The management would like to follow this up with some interviews to get a better sense of what happened on one particular Saturday that customers said they experienced very poor customer service.

Answer 2

Personal Interview:
Personal interview is a kind of survey, also known as face-to-face survey. In personal interview, an organized interaction between interviewer and interviewee take place. It is the best way of collecting data.
One of the basic reason of conducting personal interview is that in personal interview people usually tend to deliver their ideas, beliefs and opinion in more comfortable manner which they might not be willing to share in larger group of people.
Outcome:
a.
Company GM sells children's clothes. The company faced increased employee turnover last year. The supervisor of the company wants to know the reason behind this. So, a personal interview was conducted with one of his employee for better understanding of the facts.
Interviewer: (Supervisor) "How do you feel working with this company?"
Interviewee: (Employee) "Good sir, it's been a new experience every single day."
Interviewer : "Do you find any difficulty in your daily routine of operations?"
Interviewee : "It's a challenging work for me. But I am liking it."
Interviewer: "Do you have any idea that why the company is facing such a high rate of employee turnover?"
Interviewee: "As per the statement of my colleagues, some ethical issues are the reason behind employee turnover."
Interviewer: "Do you have any idea to overcome this situation?"
Interviewee: "According to me, the authorities should keep proper check on the regulation of the activities going out in the organization."
b.
JH hardware store conducted a survey to get feedback on its customer service. The management come to know that the experience on one Saturday was poor. The management conducted the following interview for better understanding of the facts.
Interviewer: "Do you know our store recently received negative response from the customers?"
Interviewee: "Yes sir."
Interviewer: "I would like to know the reason behind what all happened."
Interviewee: "Sir, on Saturday due to some festival most of our colleagues were on leave."
Interviewer: "Do you find any other reason?"
Interviewee: "Yes Sir. Along with this there was a problem of co-ordination among the employees."
Interviewer: "Okay. Thank you for your opinion."

Question 3

Follow a business-related topic on Twitter. What kinds of information can you find that might help solve a business problem?

Answer 3

Web-based Resources:
Nowadays, a company can use a large number of web-based sources for providing information about the company. Two of the most popular of these sources are the company website and social networking pages.
Outcome:
Website T is one such medium of a social network. It provides a microblogging service where one can create and read messages of up to a certain character length. Nowadays, the companies extensively use this for sharing various kinds of information.
One can search for important topics or areas of interest by following the posts. The search has been further simplified with the option of the hashtag.
Sometimes this may help in solving a business problem. There might be some posts that share similar experiences or information. Sometimes, these might help in providing useful insights into the problem which help in arriving at a suitable solution.
Thus, it can be concluded that the social networking sites can be sometimes used for solving business problems.

Question 4

What specialized libraries are there in your community? What general libraries?

Question 5

Explain the difference between random sampling and convenience sampling.

Question 6

In what way is each of the following survey questions flawed? (The questions do not come from the same survey.)
a. How many days on the average do you wear a pair of socks before changing them?
b. (The first question in a survey conducted by Coca-Cola:) Have you ever drunk a Diet Coke?
c. Do you consider the ideal pay plan to be one based on straight commission or straight salary?
d. What kind of gasoline did you purchase last time?
e. Do you think the management and employees affect your morale?
f. How much did you pay for clothing in the past 12 months?
g. Check the word below that best describes how oft en you eat dessert with your noon meal
Always
Usually
Sometimes
Never.

Question 7

Which of the following are secondary research sources and which are primary research sources? Why?
a. Information from The Wall Street Journal about current foreclosure numbers.
b. Information from a focus group with potential customers about a new online ordering system.
c. Information about an industry's use of social media collected by following a hashtag on Twitter.
d. Information about salaries collected from members of the listserv of a professional organization.

Question 8

What is scaling? What is the difference between rating and ranking?

Question 9

Visit a company website and evaluate it for completeness, accuracy, and reliability. What is the website's purpose? Are there biases? What are the qualifications of the organization providing the information on the website? Is the information accurate? Where else can this information be found? How is the website organized? Does it appeal to its intended audience?

Question 10

Give an example of ( a ) a problem that can best be solved through a before-after design and ( b ) a problem that can best be solved through a controlled before-after design. Explain your choices.

Question 11

Explain the difference between quantitative and qualitative research.

Question 12

Explain the significance of keeping constant all factors other than the experimental variable of an experiment.

Question 13

Using your critical thinking skills to supply any missing facts you may need, develop a survey for each of these problems.
a. The American Restaurant Association wants information that will give its members a picture of its customers. The information will serve as a guide for a promotional campaign designed to increase restaurant eating. Specifically, it will seek such information as who eats out, how oft en, where they go, and how much they spend. Likewise, it will seek to determine who does not eat out and why.
b. The editor of your local newspaper wants to conduct a readership study to learn just who reads what in both print and online editions.
c. Your boss wants to hire an experienced computer webmaster for your company. Because you have not hired anyone in this category in five years, you were asked to survey experienced webmasters to gather salary figures.
d. A professional organization you belong to wants to find out how grammatical errors affect managers when they are evaluating the written work of their employees.
e. You work in the human resources department of a company. The director needs to make changes to the company's healthcare plan for the coming year and wants you to find out which of the three current plans employees are enrolled in and why they selected it.

Question 14

Define observation as a research technique.

Question 15

Develop two business scenarios, one in which a quantitative study would be more appropriate and one in which a qualitative study would be more appropriate. Be ready to defend your choices.

Question 16

Select an example of a business problem that can be solved best by observation. Explain your choice.

Question 17

Using your critical thinking skills to supply any missing facts you may need, develop a plan for the experiment you would use in the following situations.
a. Golden Glow Baking Company has for many years manufactured and sold cookies packaged in attractive boxes. It is considering packaging the cookies in recyclable bags and wants to conduct an experiment to predict the likely consumer response to this change.
b. A national chain of drugstores wants to know whether using Quick Response (QR) codes could impact its profits on cosmetics. It is willing to pay the cost of an experiment in its research for an answer.
c. True Time Watch Company is considering the use of electronic sales displays ($49.50 each) instead of print displays ($24.50 each) in the 2,500 retail outlets that sell True Time watches. The company will conduct an experiment to determine the relative effects on sales of the two displays.
d. Marvel Soap Company has developed a new cleaning agent that is unlike current soaps and detergents. The product is well protected by patent. The company wants to determine the optimum price for the new product through experimentation.
e. National Cereals, Inc., wants to determine the effectiveness of advertising to the gluten-free market. The company will support an experiment to learn the answer.

Question 18

When would you use a focus group or personal interview to gather information? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Question 19

Use Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, Ask, and AOL Search to search a business-related topic. How do the results differ? Can you draw any conclusions about the different ways these search engines work?

Question 20

What are the basic ethical principles for working with human subjects in business research? Why are such guidelines important?

Question 21

Using your critical thinking skills to supply any missing facts you may need, develop a plan for research by observation for these problems.
a. The corporate sales managers for a chain of department stores want to know what causes differences in sales by departments within stores and by stores. They hope to get some of this information through research by observation.
b. Your university wants to know the nature and extent of its parking problem.
c. The management of an insurance company wants to determine the efficiency and productivity of its data-entry department.
d. Owners of a shopping center want a study to determine the shopping patterns of their customers. They want information on such topics as what parts of town the customers come from, how they travel, and how many stores they visit.
e. The director of your library wants a detailed study of library use (what facilities are used, when, by whom, and so on).
f. The management of a restaurant wants a study of its workers' efficiency in the kitchen.

Question 22

Assume you are preparing a report to evaluate three possible sites for your company's next sales meeting. All three would work well, but you personally favor one location in particular. Is there any ethical way to sway the reader toward your choice? Discuss.

Question 23

Visit a company's website and Facebook page. Compare the information. What does it tell you about the way the company is using each of these Internet forums? Who are the audiences? What types of information overlap? What types of information are unique to either the website or Facebook page?

Question 24

Using your critical thinking skills to supply any missing facts you may need, develop a plan for research by using focus groups for these problems.
a. Miller Brush Company, manufacturers of a line of household goods, has for years sold its products through conventional retail outlets. It now wants to examine the possibility of selling through print catalogs or online.
b. The International Association of Publishers wants to gauge reader attitude toward ebooks.
c. Sizemore Rental Car Company would like to add a line of hybrid cars for its business customers, but the CEO is not sure if customers would be willing to pay the higher rental price the company would have to charge.