Business Finance - Management HOMEWORK
RVP2021
MKT434RevisedFinalProjectTEMPLATE.docx
May 29, 2025
Final Project 2025
Identify a company and an area of interest. Imagine that you have been hired by this company to conduct a marketing research project. You are going to submit a proposal, design a questionnaire, administer the survey, conduct a t-test analysis based on one of the survey questions, analyze the data from the survey, and write up the results of the project.
The following information will guide you in this project.
PART 1: RESEARCH PROPOSAL AND DRAFT OF SURVEY
This is a 1-page paper that describes the project. You will also submit a draft of the survey. The survey should have at least 10 questions. This survey will eventually be circulated to the proposed sample group until you have a minimum of 20 usable surveys. One of the questions will be used to conduct a t-test on. The research proposal and survey draft are to be posted to the drop box by June 12. I will review the proposal and survey and give you suggestions by June 15.
The proposal must include the following items. Here is an example to help you.
What do you want to study?
I want to study people who run. What sample group will you study? I will survey the people in my running club. This is a convenience sample .
Sample questions – Come up with your own based on your problem. Here is what I chose for this example.
1) Age
2) Sex
3) How many times a week do you go running?
4) How many miles a week do you run?
5) How many new pairs of running shoes do you purchase per year?
6) Where do you buy your running shoes from?
7) How many brands of running shoes do you own?
8) Do television ads influence the brand of running shoe you buy?
9) Do magazine ads influence the brand of running shoe you buy?
10) Do fitness articles influence the brand of running shoe you buy?
Please note that you will have to format you survey appropriately when you get ready to administer it. You may decide to go for yes/no answers or use a Likert scale to get rankings. Do whatever makes it easy for you to compile results. Remember, you are going to have to analyze all this data! Keep the survey simple. Chapter 8 can help.
What problem are you going to investigate? I want to investigate the purchasing habits of runners. I am interested in what factors influence them. I am also interested in if there is a difference between the numbers of running shoes purchased by men vs. women per year.
What are the two variables you will be using?
I will use sex and number of shoes purchased.
What question are you going to conduct your t-test on?
I am going to use Question 5 – How many new pairs of running shoes do you purchase per year.
What hypothesis do you have? (You will have a null and alternative hypothesis)
The null hypothesis states that there is no difference between two groups.
There is no difference between the number of running shoes purchased between men and women.
The alternative hypothesis states that there is a difference between the two groups .
There is a difference between the number of running shoes purchased between men and women.
PART 2: RESEARCH REPORT
You will prepare a formal research report on the findings of the study. The project will conform to APA standards. Remember, you must have at least 20 usable surveys for your project. Failure to do so will result in a lower grade. See Laurie’s Calendar under Student Resources for the due date and the Course Outline under Student Resources for assignment expectations
Format for the report will be as follows:
1. Research question – taken from proposal
a. What you want to study
b. Why you want to study it
c. What two variables will you use? d. What question are you going to conduct your t-test on?
e. Null hypothesis
f. Alternative hypothesis
2. Literature review – this is a discussion of what other people say on the topic. It is the research of secondary sources that provides the skeleton of your study. It is comprised of research from business sources such as Forbes and Fortune, company, organization and industrial materials, academic journals, and other research. You should use at least 5 sources. You must quote from these sources and incorporate the quotes in the text of your report. Sources should be no more than 3 years old. For example, in my runners project, I could find research on the number of runners in the US, the size of the running shoe market, trends affecting the industry, information on the major brands of running shoes, etc.
3. Methodology
a. Describe the sample you selected
b. How did you recruit them?
4. Findings – this will summarize the results from all your survey questions. You must discuss the results of all the survey questions, as well as the results of the t-test and the mean of each variable. You may want to use tables, graphs, charts, etc. along with your descriptive analysis. You will need to discuss the results of your t-test here.
5. Conclusions and Recommendations – What conclusions did you come up with as a result of the study? What do you recommend the company do with this information? What did you learn from the project?
6. Appendix
a. Attach one signed consent form (see sample)
b. Attache a sample of your questionnaire
c. Attach your t-test analysis worksheet from Excel
d. Any other items you think appropriate
Running the T-Test and Analyzing the Data
You will use Excel to run your t-test (Not SSPS). You will use one of your survey questions for the hypothesis. Basically you are going to be comparing the means between two groups to see if there is a statistically significant difference between them. The instructions below are for using Excel. Please note since this is not a statistics class, my explanations below are very simplified. I want you to understand the basic concepts so I tried to use words that are easy to understand. For more information on t-tests see Chapter 13.
Remember my example of the running study? The two variables I am looking at are sex and the number of running shoes purchased. Here are my hypotheses:
- The null hypothesis states that there is no difference between two groups.
There is no difference between the number of running shoes purchased between women and men.
- The alternative hypothesis states that there is a difference between the two groups.
There is a difference between the number running shoes purchased by women and the number of running shoes purchased by men.
Example 1:
Suppose I surveyed 20 people and got the following information regarding the number of pairs of running shoes each person bought during the year.
Here is how you would input the data in Excel.
|
|
Women |
Men |
|
Person 1 |
4 |
3 |
|
Person 2 |
3 |
2 |
|
Person 3 |
3 |
1 |
|
Person 4 |
4 |
3 |
|
Person 5 |
1 |
2 |
|
Person 6 |
5 |
4 |
|
Person 7 |
1 |
1 |
|
Person 8 |
3 |
2 |
|
Person 9 |
3 |
2 |
|
Person 10 |
4 |
3 |
Do not worry if you do not have an even number of people for each group. Follow these steps for running the Excel program.
1. Input the data for your two groups.
2. Calculate the mean or average.
3. Go to a cell and type in the word results. Put your curser to the cell next to the word results.
4. Run the T test by doing the following:
Go to
Formulas, select
More Functions, and choose S
tatistical
T.TEST.
For
Array 1, highlight the cells for the first set of data. Be sure to exclude your mean – just include the data points.
For
Array 2, highlight the cells for the second set of data. Be sure to exclude
your mean – just include the data points.
For
Tails, enter 2 for a one-tailed distribution
For
Type, enter 2 for a two-sample equal variance
Hit Done
5. Here is picture of my example with annotations.
6. Note that the average number of shoes purchased by women is 3.1 pairs while the average for men is 2.3 pairs. This looks like there is a difference. However, we have to see if there is a significant statistical significance. We have to compare the results we got of 0.13 which is called the P Value to the Level of Significance which is automatically set to 0.05.
7. We need to look at 2 rules:
Rule 1: If the P Value is less than or equal to the Level of Significance, you reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative
hypothesis.
Rule 2: If the P Value is greater than or equal to the Level of Significance, you accept the null hypothesis and reject the
alternative hypothesis.
8. So let’s compare: Since my P Value of .13 is bigger than the Level of Significance which is 0.05, we accept the null hypothesis. In this case:
The null hypothesis states that there is no difference between two groups.
So there is no difference between the number of running shoes purchased between women and men.
Example 2
Suppose the survey responses were a little different and looked like this.
|
|
|
My results of the P Value are written in scientific notion and means 1.21485×10−6. This is a very small number, close to 0. Written out, it is actually .0000121485. You can see this P Value of .0000121485 is way less than the Level of Significance of 0.05.
So let’s look at our rules again:
Rule 1: If the P Value is less than or equal to the Level of Significance, you reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative
hypothesis.
Rule 2: If the P Value is greater than or equal to the Level of Significance, you accept the null hypothesis and reject the
alternative hypothesis.
In this example, we reject the null and accept the alternative
The alternative hypothesis states that there is a difference between the two groups.
So there is a difference between the number running shoes purchased by women and the number of running shoes purchased by men.
Very important note: For the purpose of this assignment, to keep things easy for you, if you happen to get results that show the E, just assume the P Value is less than the Level of Significance.
Consent Form
Every person who participates in your survey must sign a consent form. This is standard marketing research practice. If you have anyone under 18 who participates in the survey, they and their parents must sign. You must include 1 signed consent form in the appendix of your project. Here is a sample of a consent form. Feel free to adapt it.
Dear Respondent:
I am a student at National University studying Marketing Research. Attached is a short questionnaire that is part of my research project for this class. I would appreciate your cooperation in completing the questionnaire for me.
I want to assure you that the answers I receive will be held in strictest confidence and will be used for this class project only. All information is combined into a single report, and individual responses will be destroyed.
Please sign this form agreeing to take part in this survey. Please understand that you are under no obligation to complete this questionnaire. If this questionnaire is to be completed by someone under the age of 18, please have a parent or guardian sign this letter as well.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
(Your Name)
I agree to take part in this survey:
Name: _________________________ Date:___________________________
Parent or Guardian: _______________________________________
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