Differences between Three Types of Research Designs - Essay Example

Marketing Research College Answer Critical review of three research designs Exploratory, descriptive and causal researches are the main three types of research designs normally used in marketing research. Exploratory research is a type of marketing research that gathers preliminary information to help the researcher design the problem and suggest hypothesis. Exploratory research is performed by a researcher when he has relatively little information about the basic issues of the research. It is more appropriate only when the researcher has to gain basic understanding about the nature of the problem. With exploratory research design, the researcher will be able to discover new relationships, patterns, themes, ideas etc. For a company that wants to differentiate its existing products or to innovate, the marketing department has to conduct exploratory research. With this research design, the marketing department will see how its customers respond to these new products in terms of their attitudes to buy these products or their feedback about its features, quality and utility etc. Most innovative firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Vodafone etc almost always used exploratory research design to further discover new ideas. Apple Inc used exploratory research to develop iPod, by learning about how consumers wanted a portable device that could play favorite songs with increased volume quality and with ample storage capacity. Exploratory marketing research can help the researcher identify strategic management practices, financial or auditing approaches, marketing opportunities that may lead the company to achieve competitive advantage etc. Basically, the exploratory research is to provide the researcher with preliminary information about the problem or the opportunity to be studied. Descriptive research design attempts to obtain data that can describe the characteristics of the topic of interest in the research. Descriptive research is mainly designed to help the researcher to determine the frequency with which some incident occurs or to determine the relationship between two variables. This type of research is relatively rigid in nature, because the researcher assumes certain underlying characteristics of the market or he has some precise question of the statement of the research. Marketing management of a company may have to study about seasonal trends that affect their marketing. Descriptive research is the appropriate design for this type of research. Descriptive research is frequently used by companies to segment the potential market. With segmentation, the marketer initially identifies his potential market and then divides or sub-divides the market in to useful groups based on similar needs, wants, preferences or requirements. Descriptive studies depend on data collection usually by structured processes such as observation of data or conducting interviews with structures questions. The researcher may depend on questionnaire that contains specific items to ask respondents some specific numbers of questions. For descriptive research purpose, data may be collected based on production processes, stores visited, products or services customers used, employees’ attitudes etc. The marketing research with descriptive design is either longitudinal or cross-sectional research. Longitudinal study takes the form of sample respondents who are studied over a period of time, such as five months or 2 years. In contrast, cross-section research is a one-shot research that consists of a sample of the population of the interest. It therefore gives a good overall picture of the position at a given period of time. Causal research design seeks to establish causation for certain relationship between two or more variables. It is a type of conclusive research in which the main objective is to obtain evidence about cause-and-effect relationship. It gives a type of ‘if x, then y’ statement. It helps to understand which specific variable is independent and which other is dependant variable. A researcher may seek to find out why a variable- say ‘X’ maintained positive or negative correlation with the other variable- say ‘Y’. The Causal research design is most appropriate for obtaining the evidence of cause and effect relationship between variables. Basically, there are two requirements; one is to understand which variable is the cause and which other variables are the effect, and the second is to determine the nature of the relationship existing between the variables. Causal research helps the researcher verify about how a particular change in one variable affect changes on other variables. For instance, how the change in consumer behaviour affect a change in overall sales. Another example is sales and price relationship. A marketer may have to understand how the change in price may impact sales volumes. Causal research helps the researcher understand the relationship between two or more variables and thus to take appropriate decisions. There are basically three conditions to causal research design. They are, 1) cause and effect variables are occurred together, 2) cause and effect variables are to be issued in order, and 3) control over exogenous variable. For the first condition, type of service is a cause that affects sales. Good service increases sales whereas bad service decreases sales. The second condition is that a proper time order must be established between cause variable and effect variables. It means that a variable cannot be considered the cause of another if it occurs after the other event. For example, a marketer may have to understand how the price changes, either increase or decrease- may impact sales volumes. However, it is important that the researcher should ensure that both sales increase occurred after the price decrease has been occurred. The third condition is that other possible causal factors, namely exogenous factors, are to be eliminated. Exogenous variable is a factor whose value is independent from the states of other variables. For example, an increase in sales is directly caused by decrease in price. However, there can be other variables such as advertising, quality or features of products or services etc. These exogenous variables need to be eliminated. Answer- 2 Differences between three types of research designs Exploratory research is primarily conducted for a problem that hasn’t been clearly defined. It is unstructured in nature as it is undertaken to gain background information about the research problem. It is undertaken when the researcher has little or no knowledge about the problem. Exploratory research is meant to give basic insights about a problem. Exploratory research uses techniques such as focus group, in-depth interviews and other tools of qualitative research. It gives proper answers to open-ended questions and it helps the researcher to design qualitative statements. Exploratory research may be required even before starting a descriptive research to gain a foundation that should allow collection of required data. The main emphasis is on discovering ideas and insights about a problem or opportunity in the exploratory research. Exploratory research may conclude that an assumed problem or a perceived opportunity doesn’t exist. Descriptive research, in contrast, is conducted for a problem which is already defined. It is based on some previous understandings about the nature of the research problem. Descriptive research is carried out to describe answers to questions of who, what, where, when and how. It is very helpful to describe the characteristics of relevant groups, such as consumers or salespeople, to estimate the proportions of people in a specified population exhibiting a certain behaviour, to determine the perceptions of product characteristics and to determine the degree to which marketing variables are associated. A marketing researcher selects descriptive research design when he has basic ideas about the problem, and he needs to study the characteristics about the population or phenomenon that is being studied. This research design would never conclude that a problem doesn’t exist, but it rather seeks to further illustrate the problem by answering the questions of what, why, where, how and who. Descriptive research is quantitative in nature, and is therefore restricted in terms of open-ended questions. It is used by marketing manager to come to statistical techniques such as average calculations, median, mode, frequency etc. It is never required before an exploratory research. It means, descriptive research attempts to obtain data to allow the researcher to describe the characteristics of the main topic of interest. Causal research gives main emphasis on determining cause and effect existing between certain variables that are important for marketing research. It uses use experimentation techniques to come to rational conclusion. Causal research attempts to find out cause and effect relationship between main variables. The main emphasis is on finding out the frequencies of occurrence in the descriptive research, but it is on determining cause and effect relationship in the causal research. with causal research design, the marketing researcher may seek to find out why a variable- say ‘X’ maintained positive or negative correlation with the other variable- say ‘Y’. It is thus most appropriate for obtaining the evidence of cause and effect relationship between variables. However, there are two requirements; one is to understand which variable is the cause and which other variables are the effect, and the second is to determine the nature of the relationship existing between the variables. Appropriate research design to address the question To address the question – ‘How satisfied or dissatisfied are customers with the automobile repair service..’ descriptive research is more appropriate. It is because, the company has already sold 2007 BMW model cars, and the company has basic knowledge about the customers’ interest to buying these products. The company would like to evaluate the satisfactory levels of customers with the product 2007 BMW. In order to find out the satisfactory or dissatisfactory levels of the customers, BMW has to use descriptive research. With this design, the company will be able to answer to questions such as why customers are more satisfied or not satisfied, how many customers like the products, what features attracted them etc. For this research, BMW will have to use surveys or panel data to find out the satisfactory levels of different customers. Descriptive research will help the researcher of BMW to determine the frequency with which the satisfaction of customers occurs. For finding out customer satisfaction, most researchers use likert scale, for instance, to find out varying degrees of customers’ satisfaction. By using the descriptive research design, BMW’s marketing research team would depend on previous understandings about the nature of the problem related to whether its customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. The company will use descriptive research to describe answers to questions of what levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, how they are satisfied or not etc. This research design is very helpful to BMW to determine the perceptions of satisfactory levels of its customers. Read More