Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Inquiring Minds Want to Know—Now!

Case Study 3

5. Critique the survey used for the study.

There was a two-prong approach used for this study through telephone interview and self-administered interview through the mail. The first was a reader-targeted mail questionnaire which was conducted by the means of a telephone interview. This sample was comprised of a small sample taken from a household database of 1.7 million subscribers. Then a second pretest included 300 subscribers. The final step of the survey was to mail out the concluded study to a population of 4,000 participants. The participants included managers, executives, engineers and purchasing agents selected from U. S. Penton database which was made up of seven industry groups. 710 completed surveys were returned with only 676 indicating that they were the individuals who made the purchasing decisions. There was a 95% level of confidence placed in this survey with only a margin of error being + 4. Finally a follow up interview was conducted with 40 of the participants for a deeper understanding of the behavior and attitudes (Cooper & Schindler, 2014).

A telephone survey is a good way to obtain information from people from different geographic locations. Telephonic surveys allows large scale accessibility, rapid data collection quality control, anonymity and flexibility. Some of the disadvantages of a telephonic survey is that there is lack of visual resources, limited open-ended questions, consumers that are wary of participating in surveys, inattentiveness of participants and that consumers may use call screening and not answer calls that they believe might be sales related (Liberty).

Telephonic interviewing has been around for a long time and it may not be the newest and greatest but it is very valuable in the research market today. “Telephone interviewing is a tried and proven methodology which will yield high quality, accurate results in the right situation. Experienced...