Marketing Research

Pretesting and revising a questionnaire

When they are first drafted, questionnaires often contain questions that are ambivalent, cumbersome and vague. Instructions may also be confusing the questionnaire may be too long and questions that should have been included may have been omitted. The pretest is a means of discovering the faults in a questionnaire before it is administered. To pretest a questionnaire, a small subsample of the intended respondent group is selected perhaps a dozen or so people. A good range of respondents is...

Sampling frame

Obtaining a sample involves selecting some elements from the target population. In order to do this, it is assumed that it is possible to identify the target population of interest. A sampling frame is simply a list that identifies the target population. It can be a list of names and telephone numbers, as in telephone surveys, an area map of housing or a list of addresses purchased from a mailing-list supplier. It could also be a database. The frame defines the sampling unit, the unit used in...

Semantic differential scale

The semantic differential scale technique was originated by Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum.2 The originators of the technique discovered that the perceived meaning of a variety of words and concepts could be decomposed in terms of three components potency, activity and evaluation. In marketing research, the semantic differential is often used to measure attitudes towards the imagery surrounding products and services. In general, only the evaluative e.g. good bad component is measured. The scale...