Research Methodology Comparison

¶ … Market Research Tools Nike wants to evaluate its perceived customer services. They want to use the following research tools. Personal Interview; Mail Surveys; Self-Administered questionnaires and Telephone Interviewing. Compare and contrast these research tools. All of the research tools listed can be useful for eliciting information from retail customers. However, they all have specific benefits and weaknesses depending on the particular purpose and circumstances of their proposed use.

In principle, there will be a trade-off between market research methods that allow for the greatest flexibility on the part of the entity collecting data and those methods that allow for the least flexibility, represented by lesser and greater standardization and uniformity, respectively. Therefore, the optimal market research method typically depends on the goals established for the research project, something that is highly consistent across different industrial and educational applications of research methods (Myers & Spencer, 2010; Pickering, 2011).

For example, personal interviews allow the greatest depth of interview because they provide an opportunity for the interviewer to ask follow-up questions based on the specific responses to earlier questions (Pickering, 2011). This format allows the greatest flexibility in terms of pursuing clarification of initial responses and in terms of ensuring the lowest possible potential for misunderstanding on the part of the researcher (Pickering, 2011).

Likewise, telephone interviews offer many of the same advantages as the personal interview except that they provide a narrower range of potentially meaningful sources of information, especially in connection with unintentional cues generated by the subject (Myers & Spencer, 2010). During personal interviews, the interviewer has the opportunity to observe the subject directly and to develop opinions about the veracity of responses based on non-verbal elements of communication that are not available to the interviewer during telephone interviews.

Those non-verbal elements may suggest additional follow-up questions or avenues of inquiry on the part of the interviewer. One potential weakness of the interview methods is that they are more susceptible to the input, idiosyncrasies, or biases of the interviewer than market research and data collection methods based on a uniform instrument distributed in identical form to all subjects (Myers & Spencer, 2010; Pickering, 2011).

Even without any bias, the nature of dynamic interviews is such that there will be greater variation in the full list of questions asked of subjects than there will be with other market research methods (Myers & Spencer, 2010).

Mail surveys may provide useful information from those customers who choose to respond, but there may be an inherent limitation in the form of bias (either positive or negative) in that customers with the strongest positive and negative retail experiences with the company's products may be more likely to respond to the mailing than many middle-range customers with opinions and experiences that are less strong.

As a result, mail surveys may omit some of the most valuable data because, in principle, it is those customers who have not yet developed a brand loyalty (whether to Nike or to another manufacturer) whose responses are most valuable.