Food for thoughts: Exploring Diverse Dining-Out Experiences
This is your first assessable exercise which is part of the continuous assessment. This exercise is worth 10 points of your final grade.
You will design an experiment, collect data, run data analysis, and prepare a report. Please consider a scenario that you want to get a better understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions towards dining-out. You run research about students’ preferences and factors important for students while choosing between different options of dining-out.
Here are some factors and levels that might be of interest:
- Type of cuisine: Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Fast food (like, McDonalds or KFC), Burger place.
- Delivery mode: Dining-in, Take-away delivered to your home, Take-away picked-up yourself.
- Locations: can reach by foot, short drive, long drive.
- Place: fancy restaurant, café, food court, small take-away place, street van.
- Time: food will be ready in 15 minutes, ready in half-hour, ready in an hour.
- Ownership: multinational chain (McDonalds, KFC, Domino’s), Australian chain (Red Rooster, Zambrero), local place.
- Price per meal for two: $20; $40; $60; $100. You can add “without drinks”.
- Whatever you can think about.
Also, you might consider some demographic information questions:
- Gender: Female; Male; Prefer not to tell.
- Age: up to 20; 21-30; 31-40; 41-50; more than 50.
- Student: international; domestic.
- Country of origin.
- Whatever you believe might be relevant to the decision about selecting dining-out.
You don’t need to use all suggested factors or all suggested levels. This is simply impossible as there would be too many options. You select only some factors, and then some levels within these factors. You are welcome to introduce your own factors and/or levels.
Remember: online survey provider might have a limit for a number of questions per survey for free accounts. Also, your respondents might get very tired if there are too many questions. Try to construct an experiment that you can fit into 10-12 questions.
Important: online survey provider limits time when you can download your results by 14 days from the day you created the survey. Act accordingly.
For this exercise, you should complete the following tasks:
- Select a set of factors/levels and design a discrete choice experiment with approximately 10 questions in total. You can use R example presented during the seminar, or any other software.
- Register a free account on FreeOnlineSurveys.com. Create a survey according to your design. Be very careful not to use any “advanced” features that might move you from a free account into a paid one. Students should not pay for survey hosting of this exercise.
- Send me a link for your ready survey. I will check it and, if it looks OK, I put the link on the forum and ask students to complete it.
- Complete other students’ surveys to help them to get enough responses.
- When there are enough responses – about 20 completed surveys would be considered as “enough” for the purpose of this exercise. Export survey results into Excel file.
- Clean up data and run logistic regression analysis to identify important factors and their relation to demographics. You should include price as one of the factors, so you have an opportunity to run Marginal Willingness to Pay analysis.
- Prepare a brief report with your findings. Include a link for your survey into the report.
Exercise 1 due date is Sunday, 24 Mar 2023, 11:59 PM. Please start an experiment design and survey design as soon as possible to allow yourself more time for data collection.
While there is no separate marking for the survey, if you fail to send your survey link to me before 17 Mar 2024, it will be a failure for the entire exercise.
Remember: you send me a link, I complete/check it and put it on the forum, then I reply to you with a confirmation (or a refusal if something is wrong). Getting my confirmation concludes your “link submission” part. If you don’t get response from me within several hours – you should contact me again.
For the “real” assessment submission you must submit one file with your report in MS Word or PDF format. Report should be brief as this is a small exercise only. Couple pages including tables with the results should be sufficient. There is no formal limit on words/pages in the report. It can be as short or as long as you believe it is necessary. If your report is too long but meaningful, useful, and interesting to read, then there will be no deductions. However, if your report is too long due to meaningless and/or generic blah-blah-blah, then there will be deductions.
You don’t need to submit programming code; however, you should retain copies of all computer files used during development of the solution to the assessment. These files must remain unchanged after report submission, for the purpose of checking if required.
Reminder: There is a time gap between creating the survey and analysing results. You need to have a design file for the analysis. It is very important to save the design file you used to create your survey, so you will be able to use it for data analysis later.
If you have any questions – feel free to ask on the forum. You can and should discuss this exercise with me and other students.