Business Research Terms and Concepts -Part 3

Understanding Business Research Terms and Concepts: Part 3

Determine which level of measurement— nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio—is used in the following examples.

• The Association of Accountants is conducting a survey to determine the ranking of the top 100 accounting firms in the world.

• How many years did it take you to earn your college degree? 

• On a questionnaire which asks for gender, males are coded as 1 and females are coded as 2. 

• Respondents are asked to rate a list of high-tech companies as excellent, good, fair, or poor in terms of their service delivery. 

• Cereal brands are arranged in an ordered sequence in which an equal interval exists between each point. 

• LeBron James wears the number 23 on his jersey. 

• The length of time it takes the winner of a marathon to cross the finish line.

• Students are asked to rank computer manufacturers.

• The brand of charge card used by a customer.

• The pin number used to access your checking account.

Which sampling method—simple random, systematic, stratified, cluster, convenience, judgment, quota, or snowball—is most appropriate for the following examples?

• The unemployment rate is calculated each month by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey consists of 50,000 households in about 2,000 counties and cities in all 50 states.

• A researcher for Kraft Foods selects five states randomly, and then selects 10 supermarkets chains within each state to call for a phone survey as test markets for a new cookie. 

• A new product researcher would like to investigate the use of virtual teams. After conducting an interview with a manager, she asks for the names of other managers that use virtual teams. 

• A news reporter asks people on the street their opinion about the president’s new bill. 

• Jamie select Denver, Colorado; Chicago, Illinois; and San Diego, California as test markets for a new potato chip line base on her experience with these markets. 

• A researcher instructs field interviewers to interview customers of different cell phone companies in a nearby shopping mall so that they each interview 10 AT&T, 8 T Mobile, 6 Verizon, and 4 owners of other cell phone providers. 

• The Consumer Price Index represents a sampling of 90,000 items from 364 categories, chosen from 20,000 retail stores in 85 geographically distributed areas that are chosen to be as similar as possible. 

• A finance professor wants to know how many MBA students would be willing to take a course in international finance this summer. She surveys students in the class she is currently teaching. 

Which hypothesis-testing procedure would you use in the following situations? 

• The mean time an American family lives in a particular single-family dwelling is 11.8 years. A sample of 100 families in the Sycamore, OK area shows the mean time living in a single family residence is 12.7 years. Can we conclude that the time people live in Sycamore is significantly more than the national average? 

• A researcher would like to know if there is a significant difference in clothing purchases between full-time working women, part-time working women, and women who are homemakers. 

• Eighty percent of those who play the state lottery never win more than $100 in one play. A sample of 500 players was drawn and the mean winning was $125. 

• A drug manufacturing company conducted a survey of customers. The research question was as follows: Is there a significant relationship between packaging preference (size of the bottle purchased) and economic status? There were four packaging sizes: small, medium, large, and jumbo. Economic status was categorized as follows: lower, middle, and upper. 

• A company has 24 salespeople. The test must evaluate whether their product knowledge has improved or remained unchanged after a training program. 

• A computer company has a brand loyalty rating of 6.8 on a 7 point scale. Is this company’s rating significantly different from the industry average of 6.4? 

• The manager of an office supply store wanted to determine which color folders she should discontinue based on low sales. The colors stocked were black, blue, red, green, and purple.