Reference no: EM133283253

Case description:

Your business research company has been invited by Vicinity Shopping Centres (VSC) to submit a formal proposal for a research project about shopper satisfaction with the Chadstone Shopping Centre. Chadstone Shopping Centre is the largest shopping centre in Australia and offers not only shopping but also many entertainment and food outlets. The VSC management team has asked your team to submit a research project proposal that will measure satisfaction with various stores and attractions at Chadstone Shopping Centre. Specifically, you have been asked to measure the visitor satisfaction at the food court and dining sections.

The proposal will need to be completed within five weeks. Your company has been asked to collect primary data using a highly structured closed-ended questionnaire.

Background: The centre contains 129,924m2 of shop floor space, about 530 stores and more than 9300 free car parking spaces. It has as many as 68,000 visitors on its busiest trading days and attracts about 400,000 tourists a year from interstate and 200,000 from overseas.

The VSC management is considering opening an additional food court section at the opposite side of Chadstone Shopping Centre than where the current food and dining sections are located.

Question 1) What is exploratory research? Will your proposal include an exploratory research phase? Explain reasoning referring to the possible types of research design.

Question 2) What type of survey method would you propose? Explain why you would propose this type of survey method instead of other possible types of survey methods.

Question 3) Suppose you were asked to also measure how much money a Chadstone Shopping Centre visitor typically spends when visiting the shopping centre.

a) explain how this spend would be best measured in questionnaire (give reasons),
b) formulate a hypothesis about the amount of money visitors spend,

c) explain how you would test this hypothesis,

d) state a hypothesis test conclusion if your hypothesis was supported in your analysis.

Question 4) What is a Chi-square test? State if you will be using a Chi-square test in the research analysis. Explain your reasoning and identify two variables for which you would want to apply this test. Also, provide an example of how the result would be presented.

Question 5) State the management decision problem and two research questions to be included in proposal.

Question 6) Explain if you would consider simple random sampling as an appropriate sampling technique to recruit visitor participants for this research study. Also explain how this type of random sampling could be implemented.

Question 7) One of your colleagues suggests you should use a single Likert scale item for measuring satisfaction. Explain if this is a good idea and give your reasoning why it is a good idea or not. Also include an example of an appropriate Likert scale item for measuring satisfaction at Chadstone Shopping Centre.