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Quantitative Techniques-II

Notes (b) A company manufacturing cell phones is concerned about a new brand being
introduced by a competitor. The company would like to monitor how the
new brand of the competitor will affect its market share in the next one year.
(c) A ready-to-eat food major would like to introduce iced tea. The company
feels that this product is superior to what is already available in the market.
The company wants to develop a unique promotional theme for the new
product so that it may be clearly differentiated by the consumer and should
appeal to broader section of the population.
(d) A co-operative bank has 4,000 customers who have taken personal loan or
vehicle loan. Of late, the bank feels that there has been an increase in the
number of defaulters. The bank would like to know whether people who are
regular (no default) and defaulters differ in terms of characteristics such as
age, income, occupation, sex, marital status.

6.5 Causal Research

Causal Research are the studies that engage in hypotheses testing usually explain the nature of
certain relationships, or establish the differences among groups or the independence of two or
more factors in a situation. A research design in which the major emphasis is on determining a
cause-and-effect relationship. The research is used to measure what impact a specific change will
have on existing norms and allows market researchers to predict hypothetical scenarios upon
which a company can base its business plan.

Example: If a clothing company currently sells blue denim jeans, causal research can
measure the impact of the company changing the product design to the colour white.
Following the research, company bosses will be able to decide whether changing the colour of
the jeans to white would be profitable.
To summaries, causal research is a way of seeing how actions now will affect a business in the
future. Nevertheless, it has to be remembered that not all causal research hypotheses can be
studied. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that true random assignment is not
possible in many cases. Gender cannot be randomly assigned, and therefore already you cannot
test all causal hypotheses. The three main reasons why you can’t test everything deal with
1. technology, or the impossibility by today’s technology to be able to do certain tasks, such
as assign gender.
2. ethics, because we can’t randomly assign that some people receive a virus to test its effects,
or that some participants have to act as slaves and others as masters to test a hypothesis,
and

3. resources, if a researcher does not have the money or the equipment needed to perform a
study, then it won’t be done.

How to Prepare a Synopsis

Synopsis is an abstract form of research which underlines the research procedure followed and
is presented before the guide for evaluating its potentiality. In one sentence it may be described
as a condensation of the final report. The structure of synopsis varies and also depends on the
guides’ choice. However, for our understanding a common structure may be framed as under:

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