Text Book: Feinberg, Fred M., Kinnear, Thomas C., and Taylor James R. Modern Marketing Research: Concepts Methods, and practices (2nd ed). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning, 2013 ISBN : 9781133188964

Part 1-

1. Discuss some of the problems that may arise in the process of designing or conducting a focus group. In particular, to what extent can moderators anticipate the likely directions (and misdirection's) the discussion may take?

2. What are some of the desirable characteristics of focus group moderators? How might a researcher go about ensuring that potential moderators are appropriate for a specific project, over and above general qualifications?

3. When would an in-depth interview be more useful than a focus group? Give an example and explain your rationale.

4. What are the issues and steps in the analysis of qualitative data? Are there qualitative data that cannot be "analyzed" in that fashion? What sort of data do you believe would be most difficult to subject to rigorous scrutiny?

5. Many types of data can be, and typically are, collected from respondents. Give three examples of the main types of such data and, for each, well-posed questions that would provide each type.

6. Identify and explain the techniques used for estimating non-response error when communication approaches are used. Which do you think would be the most broadly applicable or the most broadly successful?

7. Choose three observational techniques and, for each, give an example for which it would be suited and one for which it may yield misleading results.

8. Discuss the issues involved in determining when and where an automobile tire manufacturer should conduct focus groups to get feedback from customers on its line of winter tires. Give a brief description of customers who would be good candidates for this type of focus group. What kind of questions would you use for screening?

Part 2-

1. What decisions precede the questionnaire design stage? What criteria govern the inclusion of questions in the questionnaire?

2. How does the respondent affect the content of the questions? Can respondents influence the forms of questions as well, or the range and wording of choices? In which ways?

3. How can a researcher overcome the problems associated with collecting data about events that are unimportant to respondents or that occur infrequently?

4. What approaches are available for dealing with the bias resulting from a respondent's unwillingness to respond accurately? Are there some biases that cannot be realistically overcome?

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of open-ended questions relative to multiple-response questions? How might they be used synergistically so that each helps overcome weaknesses in the other?

6. What does a researcher need to consider when designing multiple-response questions? What general guidelines should be utilized in determining the wording of a question? The range and content of responses? The order of questions and of responses?

7. Under what conditions would dichotomous questions be inappropriate? What sorts of questions would be indicated instead?

8. MINICASE: Suppose you are researching attitudes about "Smartphone's" (those that have web-browsing and other advanced features like GPS, music and video playback, and an interactive screen) among your classmates. Specify the information needs for this project, and then develop a concise questionnaire to measure the target group's perceived needs, attitudes, and purchase intentions. Be sure to consider that knowledge, purchase readiness, and opinions themselves are all likely to be heterogeneous, even in this self-selected group (in fact, what is considered a Smartphone may be heterogeneous as well). How might you use the resulting data set to determine which peripherals are most likely to be needed, valued, and purchased?

Part 3-

Case- J.D. POWER AND ASSOCIATES AND THE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INDEX

1. What are the measurement scale characteristics of the customer satisfaction measure as described by the researchers? How could the weighting of different aspects of satisfaction potentially skew the overall rating? What precautions might help to avoid this?

2. How should the reliability and validity of this customer satisfaction measure be assessed or calculated? Do you think these can be assessed accurately?

3. What alternative methods could be used to measure customer satisfaction? Consider in particular the criticisms of potential deficiencies of the measure being used. Be specific and place your examples in the context of the present case.

4. As it stands, data on numerous questions, from thousands of respondents, are compressed into eight categories. Do these categories seem coherent? How might one go about processing this large volume of data rigorously into eight or any of number of, dimensions or categories? Are the resulting dimensions supposedly independent of one another? Should they be?

5. What use should be made of the demographic and car description data that were collected? Is there a way, perhaps via statistical methods, than they can be incorporated?

6. How might tradeoff data on attributes, which yield the importance of each attribute in forming overall satisfaction, be useful to automotive managers?