Research Report - Experimentation - Essay Example

The source of the trust-image (dependent variable) in the experiment was a store visit by a close ally and was manipulated as one/zero. The store image was manipulated as positive/negative implying positive or negative the impression on its ability and competence in carrying out basic store services. The experiment used apparel stores for its investigations. This was a good selection especially considering that there are a great number of new apparel stores being opened in India from time to time.

This provided an excellent opportunity for carrying out a longitudinal experimental study on emergent stores. Sampling and subjects The subjects used in the experiment were students in a renowned Management Institute in India. Random sampling was used to gather the 160 subjects from four out of the institute’s seven largest dormitories. This is a good sampling procedure because it does not give room for the selection of a biased group of subjects for example subjects of a certain socio-economic class, taste preference or whose parents own large apparel shops in India.

Being college students, the subjects ranged from 20-28 years in age. This was very good considering that individuals in this age bracket were free from parental influence in terms of shopping preference for example apparel purchase. According to Kaul et al (2010), the use of male respondents is another positive aspect of this research and it improves the reliability of its results. This is because product quality for formal and informal men’s wear in large Indian apparel stores is relatively established.

If ladies had been sampled in the experiment, the results would have had some levels of bias and unreliability. This is because their formal wears are western and are only available in limited range in few large stores and selected cities. However, the use of ladies under a parallel experiment would have been good for proofing further the reliability of the results obtained from male subjects. When the results of pre-visit and post visit scenarios were compared, they were similar. The participants also verified the research results by naming large apparel stores they could recollect after the experiment.

As expected, all the participants mentioned various large regional and national apparel shops. This was in line with the hypothesis of the experiment and hence the experiment can be said to be worthy and valid in indicating that store image has an impact on the shopper trust. This was supported by use of a manipulation check to check the experiment’s believability. The manipulation check was in form of an open-ended question “According to you, on what has your friend probably based his opinion about the store?

” Kaul et al (2010), In addition to the manipulation check, an additional item to test the respondents’ willingness to visit the store again was used.. However, it was not necessary to use the manipulation checks and additional test item because the data collected were too rich to be analysed. Therefore, it is true to say that the experiment was overdone. As much as the data collected was too rich, it could also be unreliable because it could just be a reflection of top-of-mind recall instead of all relevant cues.

The experiment did not involve repeated experimentations which should have been done after some good