Chapter+5

Chapter 5: Qualitative Research Methods


 * 3.2 Your school has a presence on Facebook; All Applicants are automatically invited to join whether or not they end up at your school. Let us say your school wants to know how people find the design of the school’s homepage. Describe how your school could use Facebook to gather useful information to help improve the design of its homepage.**

There are different ways you can gather information from Facebook. First, this would be very time consuming, you could manually go through each individual to analyze what the most common interests are. Once you find this out, you can then redesign the home page with those common interests in mind. Another way is to post a comment to the group of people and ask questions like “What do you think of our homepage?” “What would make out homepage more interesting?” or “What should we take out or add on our homepage?”. Based on the comments and suggestions from everyone you then can base your new homepage on these. I think that would be a very useful way to improve the site because these people are most likely your target market.


 * 5.2 A large national grocer has noticed that competitors are offering reusable bags to customers. The grocer is not certain to what extent their own customers are conscientious about recycling. Select two projective techniques and describe how they could be used to address this concern.**

1st Projective technique could be a Picture Test. We want to know if the customers are conscious about recycling by showing pictures of items related to recycling and observing if their responses are negative or positive. If there were more positive responses then you would know that the customers do care about recycling. 2nd A sentence completion test might do the trick as well. For example: I throw my pop cans in the __. Or Recycling is__ ___. Then after inspecting all the responses you can then determine if you should provide reusable bags to the customers.