Unit 1.2
The management-research question hierarchy is a method of approaching research that breaks down into steps a specific dilemma. These 6 steps provide a road map for reaching a logical, and hopefully meaningful, conclusion to a specific dilemma. The steps cumulate with a recommendation(s) for management on how to solve the dilemma.
Below I have applied the management-research question hierarchy to the NCRCC case.
Management Dilemma
Attract more members in order to support the renovated facility.
Management Question
How do we increase membership?
Research Questions
How do we improve service?
Do we modify and improve the golf course layout?
Why did the last membership "drive" have only moderate success?
Who do we want to focus on attracting… young, older, local, single, …etc?
Should we add a pool, health club, and/or tennis courts?
Can we afford to upgrade if we can't support our current renovations?
Investigative Questions
How many members will you lose if you increase dues?
If we do a survey of potential-members, how would the results differ?
Besides a survey, how else can we gage member satisfaction and desires?
Measurement Questions
The survey in the book is fairly detailed in terms of questions. There are a couple questions I have that would need to be derived from the survey answers.
How do the answers we get compare to other country clubs of similar size?
If current member demographics are not the same as the demographics of the new members you are looking for, how valuable is the survey?
Management Decision
Obviously this is unknown. Given the existing data, I would tend to think that adding a pool, tennis courts, and a health facility would be the way to go. Attracting a younger member means more future years of a profit generating member. Also, I found it odd that less than a third of all members wanted the addition, but a healthy 41% belonged to a pool or health club in addition to NCRCC. These additional facilities clearly need to be added if the goal is to increase the membership via younger families.
NOTE:
AFTER I wrote my response, I called NCRCC (I live about 45 minutes from the club). Last spring they added a pool and health facility, but no tennis courts. They have totally redesigned the golf courses by moving tee boxes and greens. The have re-sodded both driving ranges. They have stricter clothing standards for both members and employees. And next month they are re-paving the parking lot.
By the way, golf playing memberships are currently at 683 members… their goal was 680.
Bari Courts
Unit 1-2 R
Kelly,
I agree that new facilities must be added to attract the younger age groups need to build and sustain growth. Your suggestion to use the pay per use fee for new facilities is also a good idea. It would be a legitimate method of generating the revenue needed to support the new facilities. I do have some reservations about how to get it to work. First, the current members were not really in support of adding new facilities (only 30%). Thus, most would be very reluctant to want to pay more for facilities they feel they do not want. Second, new members would not feel it appropriate that their dues are higher to finance the additional facilities that all members are entitled to use (even if they don't want to use them).
My brother works at a country club and I ask him how they would handle this situation. He said that they are very picky about everyone paying the exact same amount in annual dues, but new membership fees are a little more flexible because they are a one-time occurrence. My brother indicated that his country club goes in cycles where they lower membership prices on occasion in order to attract more members. And on other occasions they raise the membership price in order to finance upgrades.
It looks like my brothers country club found a way to institute you two-tier dues idea without offending anyone.
Bari Courts
Unit 1-3 R
Carol,
I did not use the Analyze, Descriptive Stats menu on SSPS. I simply sorted by "sea" and then did everything using the bar graph feature. The SSPS program is basicly a spreadsheet so figuring the averages in each area was no problem.
I read the definition of descriptive statistcs in the text book and was trying to use the data to determine an interesting result that I though might prompt more questions.
Hopefully this helps.
Caren,
First… case information is on page 664… it helps a lot.
Second, I also looked over the SSPS program and have figure out a couple things. I'm pretty good with graphs so I played with it the most. I hope to spend more time on the Anaylze menu this week as I think it is suppose to do some cool things. I am most familiar with Excel so I spent time making it do things I know Excel can do like sorting and filtering.
I personally would like to look at the data in terms of regional averages. There seemed to be some interesting findings that could be derived from comparing the west to the south, midwest, and east.
While I actually enjoy learning new computer program, it certainly is a time consuming process. I sure could use the SSPS for Dummies book right now!
Bari Courts
Unit 2 Questions from Healthy Lifestyles
Q1
A couple interesting numbers jump out at me.
Alabama is 10 percentage points higher than any other state in the no leisure time off the job category.
Only 5% of the people in Hawaii don't use a seat belt (or only occasionally), but a whopping 60% admit to not using seat belts in North Dakota (and 57% in South Dakota). Does it not snow in the Dakotas? Is driving on snow and ice without a seat belt a good idea? I'd like to see the traffic mortality rate in the Dakotas.
Q2
I weighted the statistics by assigning the "best" percentage a 1 and the "worst" percentage a 45. In the event of a tie, I used the simple average of the tied states. The sum of the weighted averages yielded my "most healthy lifestyle" winner… West Virginia! It is interesting to note that West Virginia was near the bottom (39/45) in seat belt usage, but was 14th and above in every other category. Also of note, I travel to West Virginia on occasion for business and it is one of the few states with a speed limit of 70 mph.
The big loser in my weighted averages was South Dakota, 25th or higher in every category.
Florida ranked second just behind WV in my rankings with a small gap. California was about a 50% increase in the sum of the weighted averages (73 to 113.5). And Minnesota was a very "unhealthy" 140% above West Virginia (73 to 180.5).
Q3.
My data is limited in many ways. First, I omitted the states that did not respond. Is it a true reflection of the US if there are missing states? Why is DC considered a state?
I used a fairly simple weighted average example. I not a statistics guru, but would think a better method of weighing the averages might be a logarithmic graph. Due to time constraints, I did not dwell into the logarithmic graph option.
Note: I am still playing with SSPS and have discovered many things it can do. Unfortunately, I can never seem to make it do what I want it to do. In the above calculations, I reverted back to Excel to provide the calculations I needed.
Bari Courts
Unit 2-1R Response to quantitative literature critique
Carol,
I dug up the article you critiqued and agree it is quite long. I did not read it all, but did seem to think it was redundant in many places. I was interested in the article because for 10 years I was an entrepreneur. I am in the corporate world right now, but see myself getting back to the entrepreneurial life style after I get the necessary industry experience. It is interesting that their findings are the things I dislike about corporate life so much.
Other items about the study that I found interesting. The survey used only people who were currently entrepreneurs, but left out any like me who had been their own business owners. With only 153 people responding to the survey, I'd have liked to see a bigger data set.
Regarding your method of critiquing, there was not much I thought was wrong. I would like to have seen a section on the background or history, and I probably would understand more if the analysis section had more statistics. However, your template seems logical, flows nicely, and provides all the information needed in a concise format. Good job.
Bari Courts
Unit 2-2R Response to Healthy Lifestyles
Carol,
After looking over your results I find that you weighted the data in a different manner than I did. In fact, I have found a few different interpretations of the word "weighted" in our course room. Yours is interesting to me because you weigh the statistics against the other statistics. The sum of all your statistics equals the whole data set. Interpreting your data is more beneficial when taken in context with the other statistics. Meanwhile, I weighted each of the 7 statistical columns individually. My data seems to best be analyzed in isolation to the other statistics. While you are in essence weighing data horizontally, I am weighing the data vertically. Of course, neither is wrong, but I am surprised at what completely different information can be interpreted depending on the way the data is organized.
As a side note, I have been thinking about the omission of the 4 states in the data and how everyone (including me) says it is a "limitation" in the data. Is it really? With DC added, we still have data on 92% of all possible respondents. I can't think of many studies whose sampling includes 92% of all possible respondents. In my critique of the quantitative article I read for Unit 2-1, the surveyors only tested 16 kids. I'm sure they would have liked to have had 92% of all kids who qualified for their test. I'm beginning to think 47 of 51 states responding is a good representation of the actual data.
Bari Courts
Unit 3-1 Qualitative Journal Article Critique
Bibliography
Langer, Stephen, (1998). Compensation and Benefits in Consulting Firms. Journal of Management
Consulting, 10, (2), 27-30.
Summary of the research article
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to provide information regarding the compensation packages of employees at consulting firms. The researchers were looking for solid information regarding the benefits in the consulting field.
Background
The researchers of Abbott, Langer, and Associates conduct research on compensation and benefits of consulting engineering firms. This particular report is an extension of previous work.
Hypothesis
It is postulated that the higher the officer in a consulting from, the larger percentage of this compensation is wanted in the form of benefits, and not salary.
Research design
The research was conducted from a survey received from a hundred 96 consulting firms in the United States. The questions involve to both filling the blacks, opinionated rankings, and straight opinions.
Ethics
The only mention of ethics was the researcher promise that detailed information would not be shared outside their company. Only the results of the study would be released to the public.
Research results
The results showed that indeed a larger portion of an executive's compensation is in the form of benefits at consulting firms. The article also released some of the statistics regarding benefits so that they may be compared to the readers current benefits.
Limitations
There were many limitations to this survey and research. To begin with, the author acknowledges that the sample is large enough to be indicative but too small to be representative of the entire field. The author also admits that the sampling was not good. The people who were mailed the survey came from a rented commercial mailing list that resulted in many returned letters and phone calls. Not every organization received the survey was even a consulting firm. Thus it is difficult to determine what the true size of the mailing or whether they received a reasonable response rate.
Critique
Are the findings reasonable? I find the information that they received to be reasonable given the nature of their mailing list. However, there appears to be no accommodations made to account for region of the country, type of service provided, annual fees charged, or number of employees. These are all demographic variables that appear to be unaccounted for.
Are the findings useful? I suppose there is a use for the findings because the article states that there is very little solid information existing in the field. But given the limitations involved, I'd be hesitant to consider any of the findings important.
Were the findings explain? There was a large listing of their findings, but very low explanation of what the findings mean. They seemed to draw little conclusions from the data they collected, and many questions were left unanswered as I read through the article.
Was the significance of their study? While I am confident that their findings are accurate, I question the purpose of this study. The study seemed to be a last minute thought, or derived from some information they had received for another surveys. Even the article explaining their study I do not feel was well written. It jumps from conclusion to conclusion without any valid explanations, and I can only assume their research was just a sporadic.
Note:
My background is such that I am best suited to use a purely quantitative approach in my dissertation. However, given the last few weeks of readings, I am convinced I will need to incorporate some qualitative research as well. I am making an extra effort to better understand the qualitative aspect of research and I'm working on how to use it in the most effective manner in my dissertation.
Bari Courts
Unit 3-1 Qualitative Article Critique – Response
Melissa,
Your critique is well organized and appears to summarize the study in a most effective manner. One of the things I do when I look at someone's critique is to see if it leaves more questions unanswered than answered. After reading your critique, I feel I understand what they did.
After spending some time trying to find something I didn’t know, I came up with a question...
If their sampling was mostly first year ACP teachers, would this not reflect a bias toward teaching? I would think new teachers in their first year are still in their "honeymoon" period where their new career is just great. Would the study not yield more accurate results by taking a better mix of experienced and new ACP teachers?
It appears you have either forgotten, of left off, a section reflecting your opinion on the article. I would be interested in what you thought of the article. However, I am not trying to be negative, I really feel you did an excellent job of summarizing the study.
Bari Courts
Unit 3-2 QSR vs SPSS
What are the similarities and differences in the SPSS and QSR software packages?
SPSS is mainly a statistical analysis package that is used for quantitative analysis and interpretation. QSR is mainly a qualitative analysis package used to help analyze open-ended survey questions. (Example, how do you feel about this issue and why?)
SPSS is used in commercial, governmental, and academic research, whereas QSR seems to be focused in academic arena with only moderate use in the commercial and governmental areas.
For SPSS, the GUI (Graphic User Interface), or the way it looks and feels, is more like a spreadsheet. But QSR looks and feels like a word processor. Not surprisingly, the SPSS output tends to be a bit bland in terms of visual appearance, but the QSR output can easily take advantage of the font characteristics and spacing benefits of a word processor.
SPSS results come out very logical and analytical. You must provide the interpretation of the data. QSR allows for more subjective results due to its method of grouping and organizing the data. Here you might be given new ideas due to the method or presenting the results.
SPSS stresses how it can handle large data sets. QSR does not say it can't handle large data sets, but the nature of the program makes it seem as though very large data sets would create a problem.
Finally, while reading the QSR information, I kept thinking of how these programs would handle a written test. It seems that SPSS would be used to analyze the True/False section and QSR would handle the essay questions. I realize this is not a "profound" conclusion, but it is an easy way for me to keep the two programs separate in my mind.
Bari Courts
Unit 3-2 QSR vs SPSS - Response
Paul,
My undergraduate degree was in math and I find myself interested in different types of math problems. It is embarrassing to admit, but I actually took a little time to go through SPSS looking for how it did certain math functions. For example, SIN, COS, and TAN equations. I know Excel fairly well and I noticed that SPSS has some built in functions that you need to build a formula for in Excel. For example, computing means and regression calculations.