milestone four

Methods

Participants

Participants will be Southern New Hampshire graduate students from PSY 510 and PSY

520. Participants will be both male and females and have varying ages potentially 22 years of

age to 45 years of age. It is expected that there will be 7-10 participants. Participants will need to

use a computer or smartphone in order to take the survey and the data will be evaluated in SPSS.

Materials

All materials will be presented to participants using Qualtrics; an online survey program, it is

utilized by Southern New Hampshire University for research purposes.

Procedure

Participants will be asked to read the introduction prior to partaking in the survey

research part of the introduction will be the informed consent. Once they have completed reading

the introduction they will be asked to first demographic questions. One of the demographic

questions will ask what field of work they are currently a part of if any. Next they will be asked

to complete a survey about their opinions on cell phone usage and quality of life. They will be

asked to read a hypothetical scenario. Then they will fill out a customer satisfaction survey with

based on the hypothetical scenario. They will then read the second scenario and complete the

customer service satisfaction based on the second scenario. The last aspect will be debriefing. A

more detailed account of what each survey aspect includes follows as well as information on

ethics.

Demographics. A demographics survey will ask about gender, age, current work status,

and current field of work.

Quality of Life Impact of the Cell Phone. A survey will be administered to measure the

perceptions of cell phone usage on quality of life. The survey measures multiple areas of life

including leisure, education, health and safety and work. Responses to the survey will be

collected using a five point Likert scale. This is an important survey to use because it will

represent the perceptions that participants have overall about cell phones (Sirgy, Kamra & Tidwell,

2007).

Scenario. Participants will read a scenario indicating that they are a customer in a local

convenience store. It will read along the lines of, “There is one employee at the cash register and

you are the only customer in the store. When you approach the counter with your items you

notice that the employee has been on their cell phone. You check out and leave the store.” They

will then be asked to complete a customer satisfaction survey based on the scenario.

After completing a customer satisfaction survey participant will be asked to read another

scenario. This scenario will have no mention of a cell phone but all other aspects will be the

same. Then they will be asked to complete a customer satisfaction survey again.

Customer Service Satisfaction. A customer service satisfaction survey will be the last

portion of the survey. This will ask about the participant’s overall customer satisfaction

experience. This will also be measured on a 5 point Likert scale. The questions will focus on the

overall experience and how they perceived the employee. There will also be customer

satisfaction questions related to the presence of technology.

Ethics. In order to avoid basic ethical issues informed consent and debriefing will occur

for each participant. A concern with conducting this research is that the participant pool is going

to be very small. This is a concern with reporting because it would not be appropriate if there is

statistical significance for any real conclusions to be drawn other than the conclusion to conduct

more research. There is also a small ethical concern about asking certain demographic questions,

this can be remedied by having a decline to answer option for any of the questions. This is a

particular concern because the participants are in some capacity peers even if they are from a

differing class they attend the same university. Privacy needs to be of the utmost concern.

Data Analysis

Once data collection is completed the data will be coded as necessary and then IMB

SPSS will be used analyze the results. The participants will have a customer service with cell

phone scenario, customer service without cell phones scenario score. There will be dependent

samples t-tests run to analyze the data collected. Descriptive statistics will be reported; averages,

and standard deviations will be presented. If the occupations will be too revealing for the

participants privacy they will be omitted. There is potential to have graphs but they will only be

used if it is helpful for describing the outcomes from the survey. The range and average will be

examined to determine if there are any outliers in the sample. P-Values and standard deviations

will be reported as will Pearson’s R will be reported.

The most relevant statistics are going to be related to the customer service satisfaction

surveys. There will also be dependent t-tests conducted between the quality of life survey and

each customer service satisfaction survey. These results will show if there is a difference

between the perceived quality of life due to cell phones and the presence of cell phones in a

customer service setting. A correlation will be conducted for each customer service survey and

quality of life survey.

Results

The anticipated results are statistically significant. The results will indicate that there is a

significant difference between cell phone presence and non-cell phone presence. The results

indicate that customer service outcomes are higher when cell phones are not involved. There will

also be statistical tests assessed between the perceived cell phone usage on quality of life and the

customer service satisfaction surveys. Is there a difference between the two scenarios and the

perceived customer service outcome? The Cell Phone survey is going to be most relevant in

reporting if participants have vastly different perceptions of cell phone use and how that may

affect the customer service results from each scenario.

The results will be presented as factual opinion and not as statements of cause. The

results will be carefully interpreted in order to assure that there are no ethical issues with

misleading anyone with the results.

The anticipated limitations will be the sample size. Only being able to sample from

Southern New Hampshire University students, this leaves for a very small anticipated sample

population. With a limited population it is likely that there will not be a normal distribution

making it difficult to generalize to a larger population.