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.
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