James H. is CEO of The Gym Chain. The Gym Chain is a
multinational leisure business headquartered in Australia. Some of the leisure
centres under The Gym Chain have been slowly losing the profit and becoming
costly to run, particularly in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. James is
very familiar with leisure industry, as he has been in this business for many
years. He retrieves company sales data for the last 3 years from The Gym Chain
internal reports system. He also accesses the intelligence system to obtain
trade industry articles written about customers’ attitude of the leisure centers.
James recognizes that competition has severely eroded The Gym Chain’
profitability. He knows that he needs some help with additional information.
For this he hires Sue, a market researcher with many years of experience
working in the leisure industry. He asks Sue to prepare a report summarizing
what she feels was the major problem. Sue prepared the report and her report
stated that competitiveness will depend on understanding the costumers’
attitude. James gives Sue go ahead to design a study to explore people’s
perception of the role of the sport and leisure industry in their lives and in
particular, the way people join to use the gym facilities. Previous studies
show that participant involvement in adult fitness programmes is associated
with their attitudinal loyalty, comprising investment of time and money, social
pressure from significant others, internationalisation or commitment to the
fitness regime. In particular issues such as gender are of interest and
literature shows that men and women will have different reasons for going to a
gym and engaging with the kinds of activities as they attend. Older people
usually tend to show higher levels of attitudinal loyalty to recreational
activities. Perception of gym users regarding the facilities, their self-image
and their feeling in general is of interest as well.
Study designed by Sue attempts to examine whether or not the
previous findings also apply to involvement in leisure clubs and gyms under the
study. For this purpose a survey using questionnaire is designed to collect
data from participants in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore for a
comparative purpose.
She contacts participants across the countries under study.
Each gym under study in every country has 1200 members (3600 total) and a
simple random sample of 10 percent of the membership from each gym (120 each
and 360 total) has been taken. Participants were asked to participate in an
online survey. Sue is particularly interested to know how much time people
spend on each of three main classes of activity in the gym: cardiovascular
equipment, weights equipment, and exercises. Participants are asked to take a
note of how long they spend on each of the three activities on their next
visit. After a series of follow ups, the company received a sample of 90
replies (a response rate of 25 per cent). Now the data collected is available
for analysis.
One issue that could always arise after collecting the data
using questionnaire is missing data and it is important to handle ‘missing
data’ properly. Missing data arise when respondents fail to reply to a question
(either by accident or because they do not want to answer the question). As an
example in the data set, respondent 24 has failed to answer question 2 (age).
This has been coded as zero (0) and it will be important to ensure that the
computer software is notified of this fact, since it needs to be taken into
account during the analysis. Also question 13 (what other exercise you do) has
a large number of zeros, because many people did not answer it, as they have
been filtered out by the previous question (i.e. they do not have other sources
of regular exercise). Their failure to reply is more indicative of the question
not being applicable to them. Examining the questions reveals that the kinds of
data collected varies by question. Some of the questions call for answers in
terms of real numbers: (e.g. variables vary, var13, var14, var15). Some other
questions (var1,var11) yield either/or answers and are therefore dichotomies.
The rest of the questions take the form of lists of categories, but there are
differences between these too. Some of the questions are in terms of answers
that are rank ordered (var7, var8, var9). However in the case of other
questions (var 6, var 10, var 12) the categories are not capable of being rank
ordered. These should be taken into account when preparing the data for
analysis.
This case is linked to the data (in Moodle). Parts of the
questionnaire used for data collection are available in the prescribed text
book (Bryman, 2011) pages 337-338. To address this assignment the current case,
questionnaire, data should be used in combination. Make sure that the structure
in the course description (Assessment Task 2: Group Project: Written report and
oral class presentation) is followed to address this assignment.
Required task:
After reading the case your analysis task will include the
following:
Reviewing academic sources relevant to the topic,
formulating research objectives, research philosophy and methodology:
Any source including books, journal articles are acceptable,
as long as they are relevant. A particular gym’s website could also be used for
some information. If websites are used they will be in addition of the four
academic sources. After reading the literature you should be able to formulate
a research and consequently the research objective. An example of the objective
could be: “to find out whether or not participants’ gym attendance and usage
habits differs from one country to another”. You should elaborate briefly on
the research philosophy and methodology utilized.
Data analysis to turn the data into useful information (use
gym data):
Univariate analysis:
This is the descriptive analysis part of the assignment and
this will include at least the following analysis:
Frequency (shown in tables and diagrams)
Measures of central tendency (means, median, mode)
Measures of dispersion (variance, standard deviation)
Bivariate analysis:
This is a higher level analysis part of the assignment and
this will include at least the following analysis:
Relationship between variables:
Chi-square, Spearman’s rho, Pearson’s r
Comparing means and statistical significance (t-test, ANOVA
test)
Managerial advice: You will need to advise James on the
findings. This could include but not limited to:
Description of the participants
How they utilise the facilities
Perceptions of the gym users towards the gym
Their feelings and self-image in general
Relationships between any of the variables
Suggestions on how the questionnaire could be improved (by
addition or deletion of variables)
Notes:
Appendices of the analyses: please note that you will run
quite a lot of analysis, however they mostly should be included in the
appendix. Only include graphs, tables, chart, etc., in the body of the report
that are relevant to the report and you would like to discuss the results
further in the report.
Students have a high degree of flexibility in designing the
research and the analyses they conduct, however for more detailed structure
follow the Course Description (Group Project).
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