After some extraneous effort put forth, we as a research team have

organized and created a survey questionnaire that will help us capture the

true feelings and emotions that people actually feel about the famous coffee

shop Starbucks. We are hopeful that we get accurate and insightful

responses to further prove and build foundation upon our ongoing hypothesis

that states how Starbucks is too high with their density location. We also

believe that Starbucks does not have the desirable food line that customers

want. This questionnaire is designed to test if our hypothesis is correct and

if not, to determine what the actual problem may be.

After brainstorming about what the important questions would be, we

decided it would be worthy to determine what kind of measurement scales

we would use and how we would word the questions. We based our

questions on the fact that they have to be understandable by everyone. The

more understandable they are the less error there will be and ultimately will

create better results. We decided to break the questionnaire down into 3

parts: Customer service, Products, and Miscellaneous questions.

For our customer service section we wanted to make it appealing to

the participant for many reasons. Since it is the first section on the survey

we want to grab the person’s attention and keep them interested with very

easy questions. For a majority of them we decided to use the 5 point likert

scale. The likert scale is a type of scale used in many surveys. It is an

interval scale in which the respondent is asked to indicate a level of

satisfaction. This type of answer is symmetric in the sense that there are

equal negative responses are there positive responses. This will help us

capture how satisfied the customer really is. Another interesting strategy

that our research team implemented was creating open ended questions.

These open ended questions seek to explore the qualitative, in-depth

aspects of a particular topic or issue. This gives the person a chance to

respond in detail. We realize that this way of surveying can be risky because

some may not be willing to answer because of laziness, or inconvenience.

Although we figure that if they do answer such questions we can understand

their behavior a bit more to understand how they are really feeling about a

certain topic or issue.

We have also implemented questions where the respondents check or

circle the appropriate choice. This is very quick, easy and convenient that

the respondent ultimately wants and will be more than happy to answer. We

further investigated the certain questions that may be used and found that a

rank order scale would be effective in some questions. For example, we

created an ordinal rank order scale to rank the different coffee shops from

best to worst. This will provide us with information about what people like.

Once we know what coffee shop they like we can further investigate that

shop and find out the main reasons to ultimately use that as a benchmarking

process to improve Starbucks. Furthermore, the most interesting and one of

the most effective questions that we have created in this survey is a

constant sum survey. Question number 10 looks at the different attributes,

and when completed we will be able to see how the respondents allocated

100 points towards the different attributes of Starbucks products.

Finally, page 4 of the questionnaire is where the most crucial

information is gathered. We decided to pack the rest of the question that we

had toward the end so that the respondent was not intimidated at the

beginning. Although these questions are not hard to answer, you simply

circle the answer you prefer. This whole page is based on a semantic

differential scale with 7 points. This is an interval scale that we use in which

we address the bipolar points and leave it up to the respondent to determine

what the in-between numbers mean. This is quick and powerful way of

questioning others. Lastly, we all agreed upon creating a few important

demographic questions towards the end so that we do not scare the

respondent at the beginning.

Now that we have created the actual survey, we have come to a

conclusion as to how we are going to gather a sample. This is called the

sampling method. There are many ways to gather a sample although only

few are effective. For example, we all discussed our situation and believe

that our sample should have more representation. The more representative

it is the less sampling error. First we defined the population as being all the

Starbucks customers in the vicinity of downtown Boston. We then decided

that we would go about using a systematic sampling method. This method

states that everyone in the population has an equal chance of selection.

Once we have the sample size we will divide it by the population size. This

will give us “I”. We will then use “I” as the interval increase that will

ultimately create an equal chance for everyone to be picked. This method is

more representative than the simple random sampling and seems to be

efficient in our situation.

By using this sample frame we will gather roughly around 100-150

completed surveys in downtown Boston at different Starbucks locations. This

will be our population size. We will take a sample size of around 20. We will

then implement “I” and generate a random number table to go along and

choose the respondents. The amount that we pick will be our sample. Based

on our sample we can generate inferences and conclusions about a

population. This will greatly help us understand the population and will

ultimately unlock a reason to why Starbucks has shut down over 600 coffee

shops in the past couple of months. We are looking forward to actually

gathering the data to see the results to see if our hypothesis is correct.