Food Shooping Survey Critique

Let me start this critique with a disclaimer: If I read these survey results in an academic journal I would not treat them as highly robust. I am ok with this. It was not intended to be a highly robust investigation into consumer perceptions, rather I undertook the survey to get a flavour for consumer thinking and research. I have learnt a lot, both about consumers and about how to go about consumer research.

Reasons why my survey is not highly robust:

• There were no incentives for accurate answers.
• The sample size was small (72)
• The sample was found through facebook and GuruHogg and as such is not representative of the whole population (although it was never intended to be).
• Internet surveys are only ever going to sample those who use the internet.
• 10% significance is not enough. 5% significance is required. The result that increasing how often you go shopping by one shop a week increases perceptions of purchasing habit by 17% is not highly robust.

What I would do different for more robust results:

• Offer incentives.
• Recruit a larger sample.
• Recruit the sample from a more diverse section of society.
• Ask better worded questions: fewer dummy variables.
• Use an experiment rather than a survey!

Regarding my opening foray into consumer research:

SurveyMonkey is a great piece of kit, but has it's flaws too. Notably, if you only use their free service then it is time consuming to input the results into Excel. Also, you can only ask 10 questions using their free service which is highly restrictive. Stata, however, is a highly powerful and useful statistics software that was able to do everything I asked of it and more.