Page 77 - DMGT302_FUNDAMENTALS_OF_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Fundamentals of Project Management

Notes Develop the Questionnaire: The questionnaire is the principal instrument for eliciting information
from the sample of respondents. The effectiveness of the questionnaire as a vice for eliciting the
desired information depends on its length, the types of questions, and the wording of the
questions. Developing the questionnaire requires a thorough understanding of the product and
service and its usage, imagination, insights into human behavior, appreciation of subtle linguistic
nuances, and familiarity with the tools of descriptive inferential statistics to be used later for
analysis. It also requires knowledge of psychological scaling techniques if the same are employed
for obtaining information relating to attitudes, motivations, and psychological traits. Industry
and trade market surveys, in comparison to consumer surveys, generally involve more technical
and specialised questions.
Since the quality of the questionnaire has an important bearing on the results of the market
survey, the questionnaire should be tried out in a pilot survey and modified in the light of
problems/difficulties noted.
Recruit and Train the Field Investigators: Recruiting and training of field investigators must be
planned well since it can be time consuming. Great care must be taken in recruiting right kind
of investigators and imparting the proper kind of training to them. Instigators involved in
industry and trade market surveys need intimate knowledge the product and technical
background, particularly for products based on sophisticated technologies.
Obtain Information as per the Questionnaire from the Sample of Respondents: Respondents
may be interviewed personally, telephonically, or by mail for obtaining information. Personal
interviews ensure a high rate of response. They are, however, expensive likely to result in
biased responses because of the presence of the interviewer. Mail surveys by snail mail or
e-mail are economical and evoke fairly candid responses. The response rate, however, is often
low. Telephonic interviews, common in western countries, traditionally were not popular in
India because of high telephone tariffs and low tele-density. Things, however, are changing
with telecom revolution.
Scrutinise the Information Gathered: Information gathered should be thoroughly scrutinised to
eliminate data which is internally inconsistent and which is of dubious validity. For example, a
respondent with a high income and large family may say that he lives in a one room tenement.
Such information, probably inaccurate, should be deleted. Sometimes data inconsistencies may
be revealed only after some analysis.
Analyse and Interpret the Information: Information gathered in the survey needs to be analysed
and interpreted with care and imagination. After tabulating it as per a plan of analysis, suitable
statistical investigation may be conducted, wherever possible and necessary. For purposes of
statistical analysis, a variety of methods are available. These may be divided into two broad
categories: parametric methods and non-parametric methods. Parametric methods assume that
the variable or attribute under study conforms to some known distribution. Non-parametric
methods do not presuppose any particular distribution.
Results of the data based on the sample survey will have to be extrapolated to the target
population. For this purpose, appropriate inflationary factors, based on the ratio of the size of
the target population to the size of the sample studies, will have to be used.
The statistical analysis of data should be directed by a person who has a good background in
statistics as well as economics.
It may be emphasised that the results of the market survey can be vitiated by:
(i) non-representativeness of the sample, (ii) imprecision and inadequacies in the questions,
(iii) failure of the respondents to comprehend the questions, (iv) deliberate distortions in the
answers given by the respondents, (v) inept handling of the interviews by the investigators, (vi)
cheating on the part of the investigators, (vii) slip shod scrutiny of data, and (viii) incorrect and
inappropriate analysis and interpretation of data.

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