dreshra

Last Sunday, our entire group met to have a long group project meeting.  We all met in Annah Grace’s office in the SGA office, and basically all tried to put together our ideas for the final power point, presentation and paper.  That meeting was a little chaotic because there were so many different things to discuss. 

We also met Monday morning to finish writing up the results since we already had the cross tabulations.  I also had to finish writing up the limitations in the methodology section.  All of us had to divide all of our paper into different sections that each of us would talk about during the presentation.  Jessica Bryant and I split up the introduction portion of the presentation.  I also had to talk about the limitations of our survey.  I then had to write down the information that I was going to talk about and send it to heather haroff.  Heather put the entire power point presentation together.  Tyler was in charge of writing up the conclusion which was the last thing that could be done since she couldn’t write it without having the results written up.  Michelle was in charge of writing up the abstract which I helped her with.  I was not a big fan of writing on the wiki so the portions of the paper I wrote up were just written in Microsoft Word.  Tiffany was in charge of doing the cross tabulations on formsite.com.  Looking at the cross tabulations and percentages will be very beneficial to the mall.  Formsite.com made this very easy on us.  Jessica Bryant was in charge of writing up the introduction which was probably the longest written portion of the survey.  Annah Grace, myself, and Jessica Holder all worked together to write up the methodology which was also a long portion of the paper.

We met again on Tuesday to make all of our final adjustments to the paper and power point presentation, and then we presented on Wednesday.  Fortunately, our client Terri Knight was able to be at the presentation of the survey.  I think our presentation went very well, and I think we covered all the areas that Ms. Knight was looking for.  Basically, she is just interested to know what stores her customers would like to see at the mall.  Both Ms. Knight and Robert had questions for our group at the end of the presentation.  Robert wanted to know if we had cross tabulations between how much people spent on an average shopping trip and what stores they were spending this money on.  Heather and Tiffany had put those cross tabulations into the final paper.  Robert asked Terri why many of the downtown Auburn boutiques do not rent space from the mall.  Terri said they make such a killing during football season because of their location that it is not worth it to them to move.

This whole week Robert has cancelled class everyday so that we could meet up with our groups to work on our final projects.  Our group has continued to come to class everyday to work together.  In order for us to all be able to work on the survey together, we made up a wiki.  We can all log in whenever we want to add or make changes to the report.  So far, we have pretty much finished up the abstract, and we have done a lot of work on the methodology.  The introduction will be a lot of information so we are still working on that.  We are going to have a group meeting tonight at 7 at the library, and we are going to finish writing up the conclusion.  Our projects are due this week so tonight will definitely be crunch time.  On Friday, Michelle printed out all the results for our entered surveys in the database.  Unfortunately, it could not give us results for two of the questions.  These were the listing questions.  So we had to hand count 508 survey responses for the zip code question and the three listed stores question.  I was in charge of counting up all the different zipcodes, and I just did handwritten tally marks to count the zipcodes.  I then entered them into microsoft excel and wrote up a brief summary.  Everyone else worked on the three listed stores question so tonight we should have all the information we need to write up some final results and conclusion responses.  We have asked Ms. Terri Knight to come Wednesday to our class presentation so she can have some input in the survey.  She said she is going to try to make it to the presentation.  One thing we noticed about our results was that we had way more student responses than anyone else.  We had about 72 percent student responses.  I definitely think this survey will be beneficial to the mall.  We had more girls respond to the survey than boys.  After looking at the zipcodes, most of the survey responses were from people from Auburn.  There was a wide variety of responses on the three listed stores question.  We had many people put down very upscale stores such as Sak’s, Chanel, Gucci and Bloomingdales.  Unfortunately I don’t think Auburn will ever bring stores like these to its city because they are so expensive.  One place I had never heard of that many people listed was Cindy’s Cinnamon Rolls and that could be a possibility of something the mall could add.  Another place that got a lot of responses was Parisian’s, and I think Parisian’s would be a better department store than most of the department stores at the mall.  Surprisingly, Spencer’s was a store that was also listed quite a bit.  Many people also listed upscale restauarants such as PF Changs.  I am glad we are presenting this week because this has been a long, complicated process.

This past week has been our survey research group’s second week of conducting our survey.  We made so much progress in the first week that we had hardly any surveys left to give out.  The main problem we faced with giving out the surveys was that we had to make sure Ms. Terri Knight made enough copies for us. 

One thing we also had to be sure of was that the Chik-fil-A coupons we had been giving out were changed.  The first week we were giving out coupons that we expired.  It wasn’t our fault; we were just handing out the coupons we had been given.  Terri gave us some new coupons that people could actually use. 

One question on the survey that I think gave some people trouble was that question that asked where do you live?  The main people that had problems with it were college students.  Instead of just saying Auburn which was what were asking for, they would say whatever their hometown was.  This is probably going to skew our results.  Some people opted not to answer the question about income, but I don’t think this will hurt our results.  One thing that will hurt our results is another question that students interpreted incorrectly.  When we asked the question what is you or your household’s income, many students thought the question was aimed at the student’s income so they marked below $15,000.  We meant for students to put down their parent’s income level.  This will also probably skew some of our results. 

At the end of last week, we divided up all the surveys amongst ourselves and put them into a database.  Last Monday in class, Robert showed us how to plug all our information into a database.  It really is interesting to look at the graphs and percentages of different questions after inserting all the surveys.  It was pretty time consuming and pretty tedious putting all those answers in the computer.   

This week Robert has been nice enough to give us three class workdays which means we do not have to come to class.  He is giving us time to work on the survey process.  Our group is going to meet during class time each day this week in the same lab to work on our survey.  We need to type up most of our results, conclusions, and different problems with the survey.  Then we are going to need to hand pretty much everything over to Terri. 

Terri is going to finish drawing conclusions and observing data using means that we as students do not have.  Then next Monday our group is going to present our survey, conclusions, data, and problems that we had along the way to the entire class.  Each group will present their surveys on a different day next week so this should be interesting.  Hopefully our group will get to work today and be able to come up with a five to six page summary of all the factors of our survey.

We started our surveys this week, and we are moving along much faster than we expected.  Michelle and I went to the mall Tuesday from 11-1, and I was definitely pleasantly surprised with how many people were nice enough to respond to our survey.  Michelle and I observed that older couples and parents who had children with them were much more likely to respond than mothers who were just out shopping alone.  I definitely think that the Chik-fil-A coupons helped encourage people to respond to the survey especially teenagers and college students. 

Terri Knight has been so nice and helpful to help us by printing out hundreds of copies of the surveys as well as providing us with the clipboards, pens, and Chik-fil-A coupons.  Most males responded to the survey.  The only people who didn’t want to participate were people who were on their lunch break and moms who seemed to be in a hurry.  Some of the stores that people listed as stores they would like to see come to the Colonial University Village mall were Express, Banana Republic, Parisian, Forever 21, J. Crew, Spencer’s, Express for Men, sewing shops, and hunting shops.

On Wednesday, Michelle and I surveyed Auburn’s campus from 11-1.  We started out on the concourse, and we were very lucky to have a lot of people participate in the survey.  We then moved over to the Tiger Transit, but unfortunately, there were not a lot of people around so we decided to try Foy Union since it was around lunchtime.  Foy was definitely a great place to hand out the surveys because people were just sitting down eating lunch and did not mind participating in our survey at all.  During a thirty minute period, I think we got around 75 surveys filled out.

Our entire group has really worked together to get these surveys handed out.  Since we all  have different schedules, we can’t all go around together in a group of eight to hand out the surveys so we have all pretty much paired off in twos.  We have covered the mall at all different times such as 11-1, 2-4, and 6-8.  Tyler and Tiffany handed out surveys at the mall on Friday evening and we able to get close to 100 responses.  I don’t know what our total count is so far for surveys, but we should definitely have enough by the middle of this week.

It will be interesting to see what kind of conclusions Terri Knight can draw from these surveys.  I hope our questions and the way we have set up the survey can help her in finding ways to reach more customers.  From surveying people on campus, we discovered that many of them do not even shop at the mall.

This week I am going to be surveying people at the mall from 11-1 on Tuesday and on campus from 11-1 on Wednesday.

 

Now that spring break is over, it is time for our entire group to hit both the Colonial Village University mall as well as Auburn University’s campus.  This week we will be spending two hour increments in the mall and two hour increments on campus passing out surveys to students and shoppers in the mall all week long. 

Dr. French has warned us that we should have probably started sooner if we want to get 400 usable responses.  We only have two weeks to conduct the survey so time is definitely going to be an issue.  Since all of us have very different schedules, we are unable to all go around together passing out the surveys so we have broken up into groups of two to four people to hand out surveys.  Even though this semester does not end for another month, Dr. French wants our surveys done in the next two weeks because it will take another two weeks to process the surveys and draw conclusions. 

After we finish conducting the surveys, we will basically hand everything over to Terri Knight so she can analyze and draw conclusions from the survey.  By the end of April, we should be able to turn in all the conclusions and data we have collected to Dr. French to be a part of our final project. 

I have to say that I am nervous to see what kind of response we get from campus students on whether or not they will respond to the survey.  On the survey, we have written at the top that it should take no more than three minutes.  However, I know that if I am in a hurry to class or to run other errands, taking a survey would probably be the last thing on my mind.  On the other hand, I usually always take the time to take optional surveys over the e-mail system.  I know if I take the time to give people my input, maybe down the road, it will be beneficial to me.  Hopefully, students and shoppers at the mall will have the same attitude.

I think shoppers at the mall will probably be responsive.  A lot of women, men, and younger shoppers want to bring the stores they like to the Colonial University Village mall.  Right now, the mall does not have a wide selection of stores to offer to the public.  Most students, especially female, shop downtown at the boutique stores if they are going to go shopping.  Terri Knight has already told us that she thinks a Banana Republic and Express would bring in a lot more college female students.  I would definitely have to agree with her because I am one of those college female students who would definitely come to the mall more often if there was an Express. 

Hopefully, our group will be able to get many usable responses for our survey so that we can help Terri Knight out on helping her draw some conclusions about how to make the mall more profitable.

Our group has been working hard at our group meetings to prepare the survey and the proposal to Terri Knight for our mall survey.  For our survey, we are asking 10 questions because Terri told us that people are not going to want to answer any more than 15 questions.  I think we have come up with some good questions to prepare a valid survey.  All of our questions are quantitative except for two.  We have one branching question. 

Terri does not want mall employees taking the survey because she feels it will take away the credibility of the survey so for the first question, we are asking if you are a mall employee with a yes and no choice.  Our second question asks if you are a student with yes and no choice, and then there is a branching question that asks if you are in college, high school, or middle school.  Our third question asks what your sex with two choices is, and the fourth question asks how old you are with no choices.  Our fifth question asks where do you live with six choices that are no further than an hour from the mall.  Our sixth question asks about people’s income level, and there are five choices.  The seventh question asks how often do you shop at Colonial University Village per month, and there are five choices.  Our eighth question asks how much money do you spend at the mall on an average trip, and there are five choices.  The ninth question asks what stores are bringing you to Colonial University Village Mall, and we have listed all 64 stores.  The last questions asks the participant to list up to three stores they would like to see come to Colonial University Village. 

For the results, we are hoping that we can get around 600 responses so we can be sure to have at least 450 usable responses.  We have not yet formed our hypothesis because we are waiting to make our observations and collect data to be analyzed.  We hope to at least get 200 participants at the mall to answer our survey and on campus, we hope to get at least 100 participants.  We are going to administer the entire survey face to face because we feel this will be the most effective way to get valid results.

One member of our group has submitted a proposal to Terri to see if she approves of our survey and to see if she will help us out with materials such as clipboards, pens, and making hundreds of copies of the survey.  We had planned on beginning the survey the week we get back from spring break, but Robert advised us that we probably need to get started this week.  Hopefully, if Terri approves of our plan, we could start to administer the survey this week.  We are getting excited about collecting some results on this survey.

This past week I have been a participant in two different surveys.  I participated in one survey that my PR writing teacher sent out over e-mail.  I think she sent the survey out to all people in public relations.  The survey was mainly quantitative questions such as age, gender, GPA, and my first declared major.  The survey mostly asked questions about my knowledge of the public relations major such as what classes are required, the required GPA, what type of internship is required, and why I chose public relations.  There was a couple of quantitative questions that had 20 or more choices and you could only pick a few of the choices.  Looking over this survey gave me some insight about how I want to put together questions for our mall survey.  I think this professor will probably get a good sample of public relations majors because she offered two extra credit points to anyone who replied to the survey.  Our group is still trying to find some good incentives we can use on people to partake in our survey.  After talking to Terri Knight, I think we might be able to use some Chik-fil-A coupons to encourage people to take our survey.  After talking to Terri Knight this week, I feel much more hopeful about our survey because I think she is going to be very helpful.  She also encouraged us to keep the survey short because people do not want to answer 100 questions when answering a survey.  Our group decided we will probably ask no more than 15 to 20 questions on our survey.

I also participated in a survey constructed by two other professors in the department of communications and journalism.  I also had an incentive to participate in this survey because one of my teachers offered two extra credit points to participate.  I thought they conducted the survey very well.  You had to log onto a computer to take the survey.  You had to read three articles that looked like they had been taken off of a internet news website.  After you read the articles, you had to answer some quantitative questions about your gender and age.  Then it asked you a few quantitative questions about what you thought about the survey, and finally, it asked you some multiple choice questions about the material in the articles.  It also asked some questions about how often I read the newspaper and where I get most of my news from.  From the amount of people I have heard that have taken this survey, I would think the professors would get a great sample.  From looking over the survey, I think the professors are trying to make some conclusions about how much time college students spend reading the newspaper, watching the news, or gettiing the news off the internet.

After taking these two surveys, I feel better prepared to conduct my mall survey.  Terri Knight definitely would like to see us target some college students because she feels that the Colonial University Village Mall could really use their business. 

For our survey research methods class, everyone has to do a final project based around a survey.  Our class was divided into three groups for the project.  My group is doing a survey for the Colonial University Village Mall in Opelika.  So far our group has been meeting on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to discuss different questions and concerns we can ask the Colonial Mall’s marketing and specialty retail director Terri R. Knight.

We finally have a meeting with Terri Knight this Tuesday.  She was nice enough to schedule a time for us to meet her at the mall to discuss the survey our group is going to conduct.  Since we have already been meeting, we have come up with some good questions and ideas for her.  Our group has decided that the Colonial University Village Mall faces many problems that could cause them to lose customers. 

First of all, the mall is located in a place where there can be heavy, congested traffic.  The selection of stores at the mall is also very limited.  There is hardly any publicity promoting the mall to college students.  A few people in my group did not even know there was a mall in the city until the second semester they were at Auburn.  Another drawback to the mall is that there are only a few restaurants in the foodcourt, and a lot of times good foodcourts can attract more people to the mall.  Since there are no boutique stores at the mall, it could be hard to convince any boutique stores to change their location to the mall; most college students like to shop at the boutique stores so there is not incentive for them to go to the mall.  The mall is also not in a very good location so some people try to avoid the mall.  The mall now has to compete with the brand new Tiger Town so this is another reason they are having a hard time establishing college student customers.

We came up with some ideas to help attract customers to the mall.  First, a Bridal Expo could draw in college students who are recently engaged.  They could also promote the mall during Camp War Eagle, War Eagle Day, and Sorority Recruitment so new students will have some knowledge about the mall.  In order to conduct our survey, we are obviously going to have to go into the mall and ask customers different questions.  We are aware that customers might not want to participate in the survey or be bothered so we are going to try to provide an incentive for them to answer some questions.  Along with taking a survey at the mall, I think it might also be beneficial to conduct a survey somewhere on campus to ask different college students what would motivate them to go to the mall, and get their personal opinion about what they think are some good changes the mall could make.  Hopefully, Terri will help us conduct a survey that will benefit the mall.

This week I am going to blog about another example of survey research I discovered on the Internet.  As I was reading through some articles on cnn.com, I came across a survey about CIOs confidence in their company’s network security. 

 In the article, Survey: CIOs not worried about security, RHI Consulting, an IT consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif., conducted a poll of random samplings of companies that have 100 or more employees.  According to this article, companies lose billions of dollars every year as a result of internal and external hackers.  However, a whopping 90 percent of CIOs polled said they have full confidence that their company’s network security is completely safe.  Of the 1400 CIOs from all different companies, the majority believed the company’s network was safe from both internal and external hackers.  I am not exactly sure about the definition of a CIO, but I would assume that it is the company’s employee who is in charge of the computer information system. 

If my definition is correct, I am going to have to assume that the CIO is going to be biased about the computer network being safe since the CIO is probably in charge of making sure neccessary precautions are taken to keep the network free from hackers.

I looked up the definition of a CIO, and it is the chief executive officer, and his responsibilities include use and disposal of information technology by USDA agencies and for monitoring the performance of USDA’s information technology programs and activities.  I am still going to support my first conclusion that the CIO would be biased toward the network being safe.  He would be biased because he is the person in charge of keeping the network safe, and if he admits the network is not safe, then he is admitting he is not doing his job very well.

RHI Consulting believes an increased investment in hardware, software and network security personnel is why there has been an increase in network confidence.

Another main reason why this survey could be skewed is because companies have reported to anonymous surveys that they have not reported hackers because they fear negative publicity or that other companies might use the information to have competive advantage over them. Therefore, not all hackers and proprietary loss has been reported.

PricewaterCoopers did a survey of Fortune 1,000 companies who lost $45 billion to network theft.  After reading some of these numbers, I find it hard to believe that 90 percent of CIOs feel complete confidence in their network.  Apparently, some of the CIOs are going ahead and accepting that there definitely will be some loss.  I do not think I would be very pleased if I heard the CIO of the company I was working for was just going to accept loss since the entire company is working hard to make a profit.

I definitely think there are some major problems with this survey.  First of all, the CIOs are going to say their network is safe so they can keep their jobs.  Secondly, I think if this survey is going to have some validity, they should have polled all the employees within the different companies. 

The topic of research study I chose to write about this week is a survey about how many teenagers are having pre-marital sex.  I have often seen surveys in different magazines where there are statistics about how many teenagers are having sex and how many are waiting until marriage.  This particular survey called Survey finds teens postponing sex also talked about the number of teenagers using protection.

The statistics in the survey were optimistic in comparison with the statistics from 1998.  The number of sexually-active teenagers has gone down 9 percent since 1998.  According to another part of the survey, 91 percent of men had used contraception in the past three months.  Academics concluded from the report that teenagers have been better educated about abstinence and safe sex than they were in 1998.

The survey was taken by the National Center for Health Statistics, and they interviewed 3,000 participants in their homes.  Some of the participants were in school, and others were not.  As well as asking the participants questions, the survey also measured attitudes and behaviors.  The survey also found there was not decline in sexual behavior for older girls and African-American females.  Unfortunately, the survey also reported that 10 percent of females reported their first sexual experience as non-voluntary.

Although some of these statistics are optimistic, I think any person is going to ask the question, “Are these teenagers telling the truth?”  The accuracy of sex surveys has got to be hard to determine.  I would think if these surveys were taken in the home, the parents would be there, and I don’t know many teenagers who are going to admit to pre-marital sex with their parents around.

I am interested to know how these survey researchers can make any concrete conclusions about these teen sex reports when the survey is totally based on the teenagers’ truthfulness.  Some of these reportings are also based on telephone surveys. 

I think the most effective way to ensure these surveys have some accurate conclusions about whether or not a person is having sex is to study their behavior and attitudes over a long period of time.  However, even if a researcher did an extensive study on a particular person, no one can correctly predict if that person has had sex or not.  I think the teen sex report surveys are interesting, but I do not think they are even close to being accurate.

As far as surveys that are trying to figure out how effective different methods are of preventing pre-marital sex, they are still going to be hard to make accurate conclusions because no one ever really knows who is telling the truth.  However, I think some of these researchers conclusions about decreasing pre-marital sex could have some truth because pregnancy rates have gone down in the United States.