What is quantitative research
Wilson 2019: research that is undertaken using a structured research approach with a sample of the population to produce quantifiable insights into behaviour, motivations and attitudes.
Types of quantitative research
Types of quantitative research
* Surveys
* Experiments
* Time series
Surveys
Surveys
Wilson 2019: surveying involves the structured questioning of participants and the recording of responses, can be done verbally, online or in writing.
- Can be self-administered through post, online, mobile or hand delivery
Or can be interviewer administered through face to face or telephone
Face to face surveys
Face to face surveys: Wilson 2019
- ADV: motivates answers, more genuine feel, ensure respondent eligibility before, improve understanding of questions
- Disadv: high costs and time consuming, interviews need to be clustered within geographical areas, training of interviewers, quality control is hard
Telephone Survey
Telephone Survey
* Used for B2B and consumer-type research
- Adv: Control, easy to train, monitored, quality control, no travel costs, speed
- Disadv: respondents attitude to telephone, sugging (selling under the guise of research) germany have legislative controls on unsolicited calls, different cultures more private (arabic), may be multi-tasking reducing attention, MC and scaling hard to do
Online surveys
Online surveys
* Most common
- Adv: large coverage of locations, cheap, no interviewer bias, fast delivery, convience, utilise images/ videos
*Disadv: only online users, low response rates, biased responses, lack of control of respondent, limited open ended questions, response time
Mobile phone surveys
Mobile phone surveys
- Good for small amount of questions, fast responses such as a guest at a hotel asking customer satisfaction
- Not good for long or complex surveys Has to be simple and short
Postal Surveys
Postal Surveys
- ADV: can select who receives the survey, more personal touch
- Disadv: cost of printing and postage, part left unanswered, time as has to be posted there and back, low response rates
Hand delivered surveys
Hand delivered surveys
ADV: cheap, high response rate
Improve response rates for online and postal
Pre-contact, existing relation, cover letter that explains about the company and research, appearance, incentives, reminders, questionnaire design
experiments
experiments are
* “Lab-based” studies; thus lacking ecological validity
* Because of the limited number of variables you can keep as “constants” and control for
* Subject to bias from “experimental awareness”: Consumers may distort their behaviour because they know their behaviour is investigated!
Time Series Analysis
Time Series Analysis
Time is often a crucial factor in understanding a phenomenon. This is because “time” is an important variable in the fields of Economics and Business; things happen “over time”; Especially when it comes to the understanding of the Macro- and Micro- environments
