Millennials and Food Sampling

Sampling Design

The objective of the research is to assist McDonalds in appealing to millennials. The company's North American sales have been flat for the past four years. Sales in the U.S., the company's largest market, were down 2.1% in 2014. This trend has resulted in a decline in net income. Changing consumer tastes are often cited as a problem for McDonalds -- the number of customers actually declined more than sales, by 4.1%. The research will help with this problem by testing the attitudes of millennials towards food.

The population consists of Americans who are in the millennial generation. This generation has been defined as those born between 1980 and the mid-2000s, according to the White House (CEA, 2014). These people range in age between 10 and 35 today. The cutoff for the population of the survey will be 18-30, so that the survey population are all adults, and all clearly within the millennial generation culturally-speaking. This also fits more in line with the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of millennial (1982-2000). There are 83.1 million people within the Census Bureau's definition.

The entire U.S. population of millennials is used as the population here for a couple of reasons. First, McDonalds targets all consumers. While the company recognizes that not every single person will eat at their restaurants, it does seek to cast a very wide net, and attract as many Americans as humanly possible. Thus, there is no reason for geographic exclusion or exclusion from the population based on any other demographic factor.

The sampling frame is an interesting challenge. It is not sufficient to simply survey college students, as they only make up a portion of the target population. Additionally, there are challenges reaching millennials via conventional means. They rather famously do not answer their phones (Jenkins, 2015), and in-person surveys are expensive, given that McDonalds wants feedback from across the entire nation. The sampling frame will likely come via social media membership, or being customer of a telecommunications company. These are the easiest ways to reach millennials -- either compel them to fill out a survey online through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., or prompt them via text spam purchased through their telecom carrier.

3. There are likely some biases that occur. For example, if ultimately the company chooses to reach millennials via phone, this is usually a landline. That probably orients the survey towards millennials who live at home, as they are more likely to have access to a landline. Yet, if social media or text messaging are utilized, the survey respondents will need to self-select, so that is another source of bias. The McDonalds name will not be on this survey, so there will be no bias in that respect. But with self-selection, it is likely that the people who will self-select for a survey about food attitudes are the ones who have stronger opinions. People who seldom think about food -- still a large part of the population, especially for fast food -- are less likely to self-select for a survey about food opinions.

There may be some bias depending on the sampling frame. For example, not every millennial might have a cell phone, or a Facebook account. To the extent that people who are poor, incarcerated, in the military, or otherwise do not have access to the means by which the survey will be carried out, they will be omitted from the survey. Furthermore, those millennials who are under the age of 18 will not be included in the survey. This also creates bias This is done for pragmatic purposes but the reality is that millennials under 18 are still part of the McDonalds target market, and their exclusion could cause issues for the accuracy of the survey.