Lecture 10 Chapter 06 – Observation Methods

Descriptive Research: Survey Methods

Lecture 10 Segment 1 Part 1

hello everyone in this chapter we are going to talk about descriptive research design and we'll
start by discussing survey and observation methods the main objective of this chapter is we are
going to learn about different types of survey methods we are going to learn how they are
classified by their modes of administration we will also get an idea of a comparative evaluation
of different survey methods so that we learn how to choose each of the survey and observation
methods for different kinds of research study we are going to learn about the basic observation
methods and how they are classified by their different modes of administration before beginning
this chapter let's discuss the canon cameras experience in usa and how they used their personal
observation method in making their way into the american market japanese companies rely
heavily on personal observation as a means of planning information when canon cameras was
losing market share in the united states to minolta cannon decided that its distributor belen
howell was not giving adequate support however canon did not use data from a broad survey of
consumers or retailers to make this decision instead it relied on personal observation and sent
three managers to the united states to look into the problem cannons head of the team that ihero
spent almost six weeks in america on entering a camera store he would act just like a customer
he would note how the cameras were displayed and how the clerk served customers he observed
that the dealers were not enthusiastic about canon he also observed that it would not be
advantageous for canon to use drugstores and other discount outlets these led cannon to open its
own sales subsidiary resulting in increased sales and market share its own cell subsidiary was
also a major asset in expanding the sales of its digital cameras in the early 2000s as of 2009
canon sold its product in more than 115 countries worldwide through direct sales and they sold
these products and with resellers with about 75 percent of its sales which are generated outside
japan so you see how personal observation method helped canon to actually overcome their loss
and make a stronger presence in the united states so what is survey method survey techniques by
definition are based upon the use of structured questionnaires given to the sample of a population
respondents may be asked a variety of questions regarding their behavior intentions attitudes
awareness motivations and demographic and lifestyle characteristics these questions may be
asked verbally in writing or via a computer and the responses responses may be obtained in any
of these forms so the question about there is what is a structured questionnaire well a structured
questionnaire refers to the degree of standardization that you are going to impose on the data
collection process so in structured data collection a formal questionnaire is prepared and the
questionnaires are asked in a pre-arranged order thus the process is also direct so whether a
research is classified as direct or indirect is based on whether the true purpose of the research is
known to the respondents we have already discussed this in chapter 5 that a direct approach is
non-disguised in that that the purpose of the research study is disclosed to the respondents or is
otherwise obvious to them from the questions that are asked to them so this is up to you how you
are going to approach the respondents so an example of a structured question is given here the
example says that shopping in a departmental store is fun now the answer choices will range
from disagree to agree so this may be somewhat agree this may be neutral this may be someone
to disagree and disagree so from your secondary analysis and from your interviews from other
qualitative methods you probably want to validate and you want your research to have a better
generalization of your findings so you are now moving forward to a conclusive study and for that
you probably have these answer choices because you know that this is the range of answers the
consumers are most likely to give so this is a very structured format for each of the question
there is a structured answer format so this is a very indirect approach because now anybody
would read the question and understand that this is about a department store and the shopping
experience of consumers in a department store

Lecture 10 Segment 1 Part 2

Survey Methods Classified by Mode of Administration

Lecture 10 Segment 2 Part 1

let's learn about different types of survey methods now the different types of survey methods are
you see there are four different kinds of survey methods one is the telephone interview personal
interviewing male interviewing and electronic interviewing so telephone interviewing as stated
earlier telephone interviews can be typed as traditional and computer assisted telephone
interviewing now traditional telephone interviews involve phoning a sample of respondents and
asking them a series of questions so the interviewer uses a paper questionnaire and records the
responses with a pencil or something or maybe you are just typing in a computer or a tab so
advances in telecommunications and technology have made nationwide telephone interviewing
from a central location very practical consequently the use of local telephone interviewing has
decreased in recent years because a lot of people usually don't you know respond to this kind of
telephone calls anymore another common form of telephone interviewing is computer assisted
telephone interviews now computer assisted telephone interview from a central location is far
more popular than the traditional telephone in method computer assisted telephone interviewing
uses a computerized questionnaire administered to respondents over the telephone a
computerized questionnaire may be generated uses using a mainframe computer a mini computer
or a personal computer the interviewer sits in front of a computer terminal and wears a mini
headset the computer replaces a paper and pencil questionnaire and the mini headset substitutes
for a telephone upon command the computer dials the telephone number to be called when the
contact is made the interviewer reads the question posed on the computer screen and records
respondents answers directly into the computer's memory band so the advantage here is that the
responses are automatically recorded in the computer's memory so the computer systematically
guides the interviews only one question at a time appears on the screen and the computer checks
the responses for appropriateness and consistency the other popular methods are personal
interviewing so you have again three kinds in home and in office interviewing where the
respondents will be approached for an appointment or sometimes the reserve will go to the office
of the individual respondents or at home and they will be asked to participate in the survey and
that is how they are going to you know take the data they can also approach general public in
street interviewing okay so in street interviewing what happens is that you just approach
someone in public place or maybe in a shopping mall and you ask them different kinds of
question so common form of that is small intercept personal interviews in all intercept personal
interviews respondents are intercepted while they are shopping in malls and brought to test
facilities to in the mall the interviewer then administers a questionnaire as they would in a home
or in office the advantage of small intercept interviews is that it is more efficient for the
respondent to come to their interviewer than for the interviewer to go to the respondent this
method has become increasingly popular and there are several hundreds permanent small
research facilities so that is the most common form of research nowadays you know mall
intercept because sometimes people don't invite strangers in home so that is losing their
popularity and at the same time in office also people get a lot of cautious when they are
participating in service because they fear that their responses may be overheard by someone else
in the office or if the issue especially is related to their organization they feel very uncomfortable
answering questions in the offices so street interviewing is increasingly more popular nowadays
another form is computer assisted personal interviewing kpi so in computer assisted personal
interviewing the third form of personal interviewing the respondent sits in front of a computer
terminal and answers a question on the computer screen by using the keyboard or a mouse there
are several user friendly electronic packages that designs questions that are easy for the
respondents to understand there is also help screen and courteous error messages are also
provided so that helps the respondents understand whether they are approaching the
questionnaire correctly or not so the colorful screens and on and off screen stimuli add to the
respondents interest and more involvement in the task is possible so this method has been
classified as a personal interview technique since the interviewer is usually present to serve as a
host or hostess and to guide the respondents as needed then comes mail interviewing the third
major form of survey administration can be conducted via ordinary mail or the mail panel so you
have a traditional mail survey and mail panel in the traditional mail survey questionnaires are
mailed to pre-selected potential respondents a typical male interview package consists of the
outgoing envelope cover letter and a questionnaire and sometimes the researcher also gives a
return envelope and possibly an incentive like a small product or maybe a discount card or
something of that sort the respondent complete and the question return the questionnaire and
there is no verbal interaction between the researcher and the respondent however before data
collection can begin the respondents need to be at least broadly identified also this method is
used for a variety of purposes including measurement of consumer preferences but then again
this method is again losing its popularity because of you know low response rate it is difficult for
making people motivated to respond to a questionnaire and then again you know taking the
hassle of returning the envelope to the researcher another method is known as the mail panel
mail panel consists of a large nationally representative sample of households that have agreed to
participate in periodic mail questionnaires and pure product states this is very common in
countries like usa and canada they are not very common in southeast asia the households are
compensated with various incentives and data on the panel members are updated every year so
there are many consumer opinion panel uh forum there are other forums where you know people
actually agree to participate in mail interviews and that is called mail panel then the fourth
method is interviewing electronic interviewing where you have email and internet so email
surveys have several limitations so because when you are sending email some email are going to
the junk or spam so no one actually opens them and giving the technical limitations of most
email systems questionnaires cannot utilize program skip patterns or logic checks or
randomization so these factors can reduce the quality of data from an email survey and require
post survey data cleaning another limitation is that some email software products limit the length
of the body of an email message so it is very difficult to conduct service like that another in
contrast to email service internet or web service use hypertext markup language html that means
the language of the web and they're posted on our website so respondents may be recruited over
the internet from potential respondents database maintained by the marketing research firm from
an internet panel or they can be recruited by conventional methods with like telephone or mailing
respondents are asked to go to a particular web location to complete the survey many times
respondents are not recruited and they happen to be using or visiting the website where the
survey is just you know popped up and they are requested to participate so that is how internet
service are taken

Lecture 10 Segment 2 Part 2

no company involved with the music industry can ignore the online music market it is a growing
and highly dynamic industry segment so sony is cautious of this fact and has developed an
innovative means to intertwine the views of the lead users of the internet to capture the pulses of
this market so it happens that the voice of the elite is a web-based survey run by sony on the
playstation website the access to the survey is restricted to select members of the ps website who
also are very serious gamers aside from making the respondents feels a bit important sony
surveys are often very interesting they share some of their results with the respondents which
often provides new insights sony regularly shares a result from an earlier survey as part of a
current one this is a good practice for this kind of ongoing loyalty market research program since
everyone wants to know how his or her opinion matches that of the panel one of the most recent
surveys was directed towards understanding the online music industry from the user's point of
view sony asked its pool of loyal ps3 gamers where do you go online to download music results
were as follows itunes 18.8 percent napsters 8.6 percent music match 7.8 percent reps only 2.9
percent buy music 2.2 percent and so on so sony receives considerable revenues in the form of
royalties from legal music downloads naturally sony's strategy is to promote legal online music
downloading and reduce illegal downloading to this end sony provides access to online music
stores through its official website the survey results presented here gave some interesting insights
used to design this service it suggests that among the very savvy internet users itunes has a large
lead but not as large as you might expect and that the napster brand has indeed helped a relative
uh late comer curve out a number two position among the legal services at least with this
segment of the online population the options for downloading providing that in the sony site
where in good part decided by the results of the survey even the positioning of the sites in the list
reflects the survey results with itunes and napsters finding their way to the top of the list so
several web-based services are available for fielding online service create survey and surama
zumerang let you create an administered online service at their sites there are other software
package available for working with telephone online and printed questionnaires so it handles all
phases of survey projects from creating questionnaires through data entry interviewing email or
web page internet service to produce tables graphics and trust reports so you see how these
companies are using different kinds of survey methods to gain insights into consumer feedback
or consumers choice of different kinds of

Criteria for Evaluating Survey Methods

Lecture 10 Segment 3 Part 1

now that we have learned about the different kinds of survey methods we need to also learn
about the evaluation criterias because if we understand that which survey methods will be best
suitable for which kind of research study we will obtain the maximum number of reliable and
valid data so let's look at those criterias number one is it is diversity of data collection that means
whether or not your survey methods allows for a diversified questions ranging from very simple
questions to very complex questions because sometimes some of the survey methods you will
see that if you ask too many complicated questions and if the respondents don't understand them
then they will not be able to answer them properly so the survey methods must have an option
where you can ask for diversified questions some of the survey methods will allow you to do that
some of the methods will be there will be a limitation to do so for example if you are present
when the respondents are giving responses or when they are answering the questionnaire and if
they don't understand you are there to help them out so if there is a complicated question that
they don't understand if the interviewer is also present in front of them then they will be able to
explain those complex question to the respondents also if you see that there is an option where
you are given an email you receive an email and in that email there is a questionnaire and there
are complicated questions there are technical questions that you don't understand so that limits
the use of diversity of data collection process you don't have the option to collect complicated
data for complicated questions through emails or through computer assisted questions or over
telephone because then that will be difficult for the respondents to understand then comes the
flexibility of asking questions okay you a interaction where the interviewer is present in front of
the respondents you can get the responses far easily because you can use other unstructured
methods or you know you can use you know verbal cues and you can persuade the respondents
whereas in case of the more computer assisted questionnaire or in case of mail or in case of male
panels it is not always possible because the interaction between the respondents and the
interviews are very limited also in a telephone assisted interviews you cannot ask someone to
rate a brand because they're they're doing it over the phone how can they rate from 1 to 15 about
their preferred brand of shampoo or preferred brand of cereal it's not possible the flexibility of
questions is gain is limited where there is less personal interaction or varies in in certain forms of
survey methods where the respondents cannot use pen and paper to answer their questions then
comes the use of physical stimuli some of the questions require you to show a product you some
of the question requires you to show a commercial or maybe a prototype of the product so that is
why the mall intercept interview methods are gaining more and more popularity because you can
actually show the product to the consumers because the stores are just right there but it is not
possible in home because you cannot carry all the products to respondents home especially if
they're large volume product you cannot carry them to their office so again the use of physical
stimuli is moderate to low in certain areas whereas it is high in small intercept then comes
sample control sample control is the ability of the survey mode to reach the unit specified in the
sample effectively and efficiently at least in principle in-home personal interviews offer the best
sample control it is possible to control which sample units are interviewed who is interviewed
the degree of participation of other members of the household and many other aspects of data
collection in practice to achieve a high degree of control the researcher has to overcome several
problems it is difficult to find a respondents at home during the day because most people would
go outside work or maybe they are going for school or college education even for safety reasons
interviewers are reluctant to venture into certain neighborhoods and people have also become
very cautious of responding to strangers who are just coming to their doors imagine in
bangladesh a lot of people will not be allowed to go to the different apartment buildings so that is
a limitation there sample control is again the ability of the survey mode to reach the unit
specified in the sample effectively and efficiently then comes quantity of data quantity of data
means that in home or personal interviews it will allow the researcher to collect large amounts of
data the social relationship between the interviewer and the respondent as well as the home
environment will motivate the respondent to spend more time in the interview less effort is
required of the respondent in a personal interview than in a telephone or male interview the
interview records answers in open-ended questions and provides visual aids to help with lengthy
and complex skills so it is far easier to gather more and more data through personal interaction in
home interviews or in office interviews or small intercepts whereas it is difficult to encourage or
motivate people to go through the email that they're receiving and responding to that or maybe
through the physical mail that they receive because in that case they'll have to again mail back
the researcher so sometimes it is difficult to respond to that then comes response rate response
rate is broadly defined as the percentage of the total attempted interviews that are completed that
means in case of personal in-home mall intercept and computer assisted interviews the highest
response rate achieved is possible and sometime and the typical response rate in these cases are
between 60 to 98 problems caused by not at homes can often be resolved by calling back in
different times telephone interviews traditional and cateye interviews uh is moderate response
rate between 40 to 60 percent so you see again response rate is important in choosing the survey
method because how many completed responses are you were getting is important in choosing an
appropriate survey method because again administering questionnaires going through the whole
data collection process is time consuming and expensive so you want maximum yield in your
data collection you are distributing to a large number of people you are mailing it to a large
number of people and that is involving time and money and then you wait for a month and you
don't receive more than 50 emails or mails that is going to be quite frustrating for the researcher
but maybe for that kind of research you have not chosen the right kind of sample okay you
should have chosen the appropriate sample for or appropriate sample survey method for that the
research that you are doing for example maybe you were doing a research on teenage health
products now you want the teenagers people who are aged from 18 to 19 to respond to your
questions the best process would have been going to shopping malls going to those stores where
these teenage consumers and customers would come and then you would interview them instead
you have mailed them now nowadays no one checks mail i mean this teenager they are not going
to check mails so they are not they don't have the time to go through the mail they open it and
then they are going to go through the questionnaire and actually going to mail it back to you so
the response rate from this kind of survey will be very low but imagine if you were doing a
research on real estate or maybe life insurance policy or maybe on banking services and your
respondents are people aged over 60. now you have a respondent sample who have a lot of time
because they have retired from work so maybe now they're that they're at home they don't mind
spending few ah minutes in opening up the mail and going through the questionnaire and then
again returning it to you so choosing the survey method appropriately is very important then
comes perceived anonymity this is where the respondents are going to be cautious about whether
their responses are going to be revealed that means you are going to reveal their personal
identities especially if you are taking their interviews inside their office and you are asking them
sensitive questions about their leadership style or maybe their office culture or maybe the
motivation factors present in their office then they will be very cautious in responding to your
replies because they will fear that their personal identities will be revealed imagine if there is
only one product developed manager who is a female and you are asking them to reveal their
positions and their gender at the same time and you are asking them sensitive questions about
their organizational policies but this lady is then going to be very cautious about answering them
because she knows that the moment that the management will see the questioner that it is
answered by one female product development manager and because she's the only one in that
position in that organization and she has said some very sensitive or potential thing i mean
potentially confidential things about the organization then there are going to be issues related to
her carrier and she's not going to risk that chance so these are different limitations in the survey
methods so you have to understand how you are going to administer the question which survey
method you are going to
Lecture 10 Segment 3 Part 2

there can be a lot of problem coming from the interviewer the interviewer can be biased as well
you see in there are some research where you need to conduct survey on a large number of
sample maybe this sample is located in different cities people are located in different location
and you have to conduct survey on a large number of sample so you need a team of people to
help you out in these cases sometimes the interviewer may create a lot of biases in your research
first of all for example they were supposed to interview someone who has retired from work
about their you know life insurance plan or maybe their plan for after retirement life you are
doing the quality of life of um people who are who have retired from work now instead of you
know interviewing the mail members who have retired from work in the research because that is
your sample they have recorded any mail members responses in the survey so that means they're
changing the sample then there might be a problem where the interviewer has uh you know
recorded the responses wrongly so that can be another problem also maybe the interviewer has
not administered the questions he doesn't know the importance of each and every question that
you have given in the research so they may skip one or two questions because they're in a hurry
or they feel that the respondents are not willing to answer so they don't want to pursue any more
so a lot of interviewer bias can be there second of all social desirability is another problem social
desirability means that you know uh the tendency of the respondents to give answers that are
socially acceptable whether or not they are true because mail surveys mail panels and internet
service do not involve any social interaction between the interviewer and the respondents they
are least susceptible to social desirability but in case where the interviewer and the respondents
are meeting and the interviewer is present in front of the respondents and they are asking
questions and recording the answers usually in these cases respondents are not going to give their
true opinion on certain factors because they might feel that this is a socially unacceptable answer
okay so this kind of bias and errors can be there in different kinds of survey methods then cost is
another issue in research because you see that some of the research for large samples specially
the cost of internet service is the lowest printing main linking and interviewer cost are eliminated
in this kind of research whereas if you involve large sample size and you are involving a team of
interviewer and you are also printing the questionnaire so the cost can increase in that case okay
so however when the sample size is small the programming cost can be substantial and other low
cost methods are there as like mail and email surveys but personal interviews tend to be the most
expensive mode of data collection per completed response so the choice of survey methods again
depend on the cost of the research and finally the speed the speed means the how fast you can
receive or how fast you can achieve different kinds of data so the internet is by far the fastest
method of obtaining data from a large number of respondents first of all there is the speed with
which a questionnaire can be created distributed to the respondents and the data returned since
printing mailing and data gain delays are eliminated the researcher can have data in hand within
hours of writing an internet questionnaire data are usually obtained in the electronic form so
statistical analysis software can be programmed to process standard questionnaires and return
statistical summaries when charts automatically so that again allows the researcher to conduct
the surveys or research methods more appropriately the email service is also very fast although
slower than the internet since greater time is needed to compile an email list and data entry is
also required so the choice of survey method again depends on the speed at which you are going
to collect the data so in this table you can see a comparative evaluation of survey methods so the
flexibility of data shows that it is moderate to high in phone or computer assisted telephone
interviews in-home interviews have the highest flexibility of data collection so a small intercept
it is also moderate to high in kpi that means computer assisted personal interviews because the
interaction between the researcher and respondent is not there but you can use some computer
assisted um facilities that that will allow to incorporate some of the uh options that the
respondents will look for in presence of an interviewer it is very low in mail in surveys mail
panels and email however the internet again has moderate to high because of certain customized
features that you can incorporate in the internet uh questionnaire system diversity of question is
very low in again telephone or computer assisted telephone interviews because you cannot ask
someone to rank or rate different questions then the asking of complicated questions also will
limit the responses however it is high in in-home wall intercept and computer assisted personal
interviews it is moderate in mail surveys mail panels and email and it is moderate to high in
internet if we talk about person a perceived and innovative then it is moderate in computer
assisted telephone interviews again because people feel that someone else is listening probably
so they are very cautious about their true responses for you know sensitive questions but it is
very low in in-home small intercept and kpi because again people are present in front of them so
they are very cautious about giving responses to sensitive questions however in case of male
interviews and male panels it is quite high and also in case of internet because people know that
no one is so in front of them so they can be very much you know open and true about the
responses in these cases so this table is something that will help you to understand how different
survey methods are chosen please remember that this table is not required for the assessment in
the exam this is just for your understanding of how different survey methods are chosen thank
you all of you for your attention hopefully by this time you know the different survey methods
and you are more confident in learning or

Lecture 11 Chapter 06 – Observation Methods

Observation Method

Observation Method

hello everyone in this chapter we are going to talk about descriptive research design and we'll
start by discussing survey and observation methods the second type of descriptive research
methods used in descriptive studies is observation observation involves recording the behavioral
patterns of people objects and events in a systematic manner to obtain information about the
phenomenon of interest the observer does not question or communicate with the people being
observed information may be recorded as the events occur or from records of past events
observational methods may be structured or unstructured direct or indirect furthermore
observation may be conducted in a natural or conceived environment and we are going to learn
about that now what is structured versus unstructured observation means for structured
observation you see the researcher specifies in detail what is to be observed and how the
measurements are to be recorded so it can be an auditor performing inventory analysis in a store
that means when he is recording what products are there what kind of products are expiring very
in a near date what kind of products are shelved uh in a better place what kind of products are
shelved at the back so then audi when the auditor is recording this kind of observations they are
basically doing a structured observation an unstructured observation is when the observer
monitors all aspects of the phenomenon that seems relevant to the problem at hand example
observing children playing with new toys so often toy companies are going to invite children of
different age and then they're going to give different sorts of toys to them and they're just going
to sit at the back and observe how children respond to different kinds of toys the observation is
very unstructured because the researcher don't know how the children's are going to react in front
of the toys okay some may sit quietly and play some may get very excited some may start
banging the toys some may try to fit in different kinds of toys into each other as in it is a puzzle
so this unstructured observation allows the researcher to observe different aspects that probably
they have not imagined so this is the difference between structured observation and unstructured
in a structured observation you have a pattern that you want to follow in observing what exactly
you want to see in the respondents behavior for example again if you go to a store and you will
see how many respondents uses or buys you know their products using credit card so this is the
only thing that you want to observe and you stand in front of a cash register and you see how
many people actually get out um take their credit card out from their wallet and punch it so that
is the structured observation unstructured observation in the same situation would be you don't
know exactly uh whether you want to see the use of credit card or debit card or cash payment
you just want to see how consumer behave when they are coming in front of a cash register and
you may find out different interesting observation from there you may see that some people are
using their credit card some people are using their debit card some people are using their you
know membership card loyalty points some people are just buying with cash some people may
decide to put back some of the products if they feel that the product is going beyond their budget
or something so this is an unstructured observation where you don't know exactly what you want
to um see you just want to have an overall understanding of how people behave when they're
checking out their products

Lecture 11 Segment 1 Part 2