Case Study

Your friend is doing his Master's dissertation. Because many companies have recently started to engage in sustainability activities she is interested in if and how consumers award sustainability with a more favourable attitude and/or behaviour. She has seen a recent study from the US conducted by Hartmann et al. (2013) and would like to know if the consumers in the UK are similar. Hartmann et al. have conducted and experiment with two groups to test the effect of companies' sustainability activities on consumer's attitude and behaviour. After the "treatment" the two groups of respondents filled out a questionnaire with a number of questions about their attitude and their behaviour and some control variables. Hartmann's study was based on a representative sample (in terms of age, gender and employment situation) of 1000 US inhabitants.

Your friend wants to replicate this study in the UK and is first thinking about the sample. She is doing some part-time work in at Greenpeace. So she approached her line manager about using employees as a sample since they are all consumers at the same time and they should be experts when it comes to sustainability activities, but her manager was reluctant to give permission. Nevertheless, she e-mailed the experimental treatment and the questionnaire to some colleagues (using the work e-mail) and has succeeded in getting thirty questionnaires completed through this method. Since these answers only represented the first group of the experiment she felt that this did not give her a large enough sample, so she tried approaching people sitting in coffee bars at lunch time and made a face-to-face interview with them to fill up the second group. She succeeded in getting a further thirty-five questionnaires completed this way. Finally, she posted her questionnaire on Facebook and encouraged her friends to fill it in trying to fill in some for experimental group one and some for experimental group two. She had forty completed questionnaires through this source. So overall she has 105 usable questionnaires 51 in group one and 54 in group two. She has input the data from all of these on to an Excel spread sheet to later transfer it to SPSS.

Here are some of the answers she got. And by the way your friend thought the initial questions from Hartmann et al. were too academic, so she adapted them to make them shorter and easier to answer for the respondents. The number of responses are received to each answer are in brackets (N=105).

1. Do you think sustainability is important?

Group 1: Yes (51) No (0)

Group 2: Yes (49) No (5)

2. Would you be willing to pay more for products that have sustainable attributes?

Group 1: Yes (38) No (3) Blank (10)

Group 2: Yes (35) No (15) Blank (2)

3. For those respondents, which have answered yes to question 2: How much would you be willing to pay more?

Group 1: Group 2:

1% more (28) 1% more (27)

2% more (3) 2% more (3)

3% more (2) 3% more (1)

5% more (0) 5% more (2)

10% more (2) 10% more (0)

Blank (3) Blank (2)

Your friend was pleased to have completed her data collection. However, when she had a talk with her supervisor she was told that her data collection was inadequate. Certainly if she wanted to compare her data to those in the US survey by Hartmann et al she would need to re-do her survey. Also she found that the answer she got, does not really give her a clear picture, everybody thinks that sustainability is important, so companies should definitely do something about it, but she was also surprised that so many did not answer some of the questions. Showing her results to a colleague at Greenpeace, the colleague said that she is not surprised about the results.

Question

1 Why do you think your friend's supervisor thought her data collection was inadequate?

What errors do you feel she made in identifying and accessing her sample?

2. Explain the main idea and the procedure of an experiment. Then please justify why this is an appropriate way to investigate the question whether sustainability is important to consumers or not.

Try to come up with an idea of how your friend might have done the experimental treatment for the two groups.

3: Please evaluate the above questions and answers.

What kind of scale is used?

What information do you get from them?

How could you have improved the questions?

Please draft how you would have revised the questions

Why do you think some respondents have left out the answer?