Chapter 7

A research proposal

may include information about costs, what data will be collected, and how long the process will take.

When interpreting data, a marketing manager should

realize that statistical summaries from a sample may not be precise for the whole population.

Which of the following statements is true of ethnographic research?

Ethnography involves studying customers in their homes or at work.

Which of the following statements is true of international marketing research?

If a firm is doing similar research projects in different markets around the world, a manager should establish some basic guidelines at the outset.

Which of the following statements is true of a focus group?

In a focus group, an interviewer seeks group interaction to stimulate thinking and get immediate reactions.

Which of the following statements about marketing information systems is true?

Marketing information systems can handle big data—or data sets too large and complex to work with typical database management tools.

Which of the following statements is accurate regarding quantitative research?

Quantitative research seeks structured responses that can be summarized in numbers.

Which of the following is a common mistake marketing managers tend to make during the first step of the marketing research process?

They confuse problems with symptoms.

Which of the following is a major problem with questionnaires?

They often have a poor response rate.

A market research online community is best defined as

a group of people who share a common interest and use the Internet to participate in ongoing research.

Which of the following displays up-to-the-minute marketing data in an easy-to-read format that managers can use to monitor business activity and respond quickly to problems?

a marketing dashboard

Eva, a marketing researcher, wants to do in-depth research on business customers' experiences with the company's products. She is most likely to get what she wants if she uses

a personal interview.

A small manufacturing firm has just experienced a rapid drop in sales. The marketing manager thinks he knows what the problem is and carefully analyzes secondary data to verify his assumption. His next step should be to

conduct informal discussions with outsiders to check his assumption.

When using randomly selected samples, researchers determine the likely accuracy of the sample by analyzing it with regard to the ______, or the range on either side of an estimate that is likely to hold the true value for the population.

confidence interval

Databases are stored in ______ so that they are available when needed.

data warehouses

The most difficult step in the marketing research process is

defining the problem.

Small companies

depend on their salespeople or managers to conduct marketing research.

Secondary data refers to

information that has been collected or published already.

A situation analysis aids the marketing research process in all the following ways except that it

interprets data and converts it to useful knowledge and business wisdom.

Marketing research helps managers make better marketing decisions because it

offers objective information gathered using the scientific method.

Shonda is using open-ended questions to interview people from her company's target market in order to find out, in-depth, about their feelings about a new product. Shonda is conducting ______ research.

qualitative

For the experimental method to work, researchers must use two or more groups that are

similar in most ways, except the characteristic being tested.

When conducting surveys, researchers

study only a sample of the population they are interested in.

The scientific method is important in marketing research because it

uses observations to develop hypotheses and then test them.

Lucy is conducting market research to gauge home owners' interest levels in different types of imported rugs. However, because this is a somewhat specialized topic, she is worried that respondents may not know enough to tell the types apart, meaning they may indicate that they like Bokhara rugs best when they really prefer Khotan rugs. In other words, Lucy is concerned about the ______ of her results, or the extent to which her data measures what it is intended to measure.

validity