Market Research Case Note 4

Case Note #4 1. Go through the survey questionnaire in Exhibit 1 as a respondent. What are the merits of this questionnaire? (0.5 pt) What are apparent shortcomings? (0.5 pt) A: First off, I really appreciate that they put in the effort to tell the respondent how long the survey is going to take. Realistically, if I got to the 3 rd page of the survey and didn’t know how much longer it would take, I would probably quit taking the survey. In addition, it is good that they clearly specified the prize and how to be eligible to receive it. A lot of these are great questions to determine the current housing situation of the respondent and their preferred style of living because that can reveal a lot about what’s wrong with their current living situation. On the flip side, there are some questions like “..how much did your rent increase” that some respondents may not know the answer to. If I were a respondent and ran into many questions that I had no idea about what the answer was even if there was an option stating, “I’m not sure”, it would still be a turn-off and might restrict me from finishing the survey. I think its also very helpful that they asked qualitative questions regarding expectations and ideal situations in order to gauge what students are expecting and to find out what their thoughts are on campus housing. Overall, the survey did a great job especially in thinking forward about how they can implement this data into actionable responses. 2. Reflect on your own experience with housing as a student. Is there an important aspect of your experience that was not captured by the 2001 survey? (0.2 pt) Write a question (or a block of questions) that should be added to the survey to capture that aspect in a manner that might impact decision making (0.2 pt). Please don’t forget to specify the format of the answer to your question (e.g., a five-point scale) (0.2 pt). Predict the average answer(s) to your question(s) (0.2 pt) and the impact on actual decision making it might have. (0.2 pt) Try to achieve professionalism in your wording. A: One important aspect that the 2001 survey failed to address was the availability/proximity of a dining hall. For me, I had a great experience living in Warren because the dining hall was incorporated into the dorm building. Even for graduate students who are more inclined to live oncampus might see that as an issue and would want to have the capability to answer to that question. A question that could be included in Section D under building features is “Access to University-Run Dining Hall” from a scale of “Not at all important” to “Very Important”. There can be a huge pool of students that are being missed from this important collection of data especially if they are more inclined to live in dorm-style buildings and want access to Harvard’s dining program. Even though they are graduate students, they might be more inclined to have ready-made meals instead of having to cook them in an apartment-style building that has built-in features like kitchens and sinks. I think the average respondent would probably say “Somewhat Important” but that really depends on the pool of the survey respondents. The impact that it can have is crucial because Harvard might want to think about installing a dining hall in their Allston “campus” especially if enough respondents mark a relative importance for that feature.