Critical Thinking 2

Option 1: Springdale Shopping Survey

Instructions

The major shopping areas in the community of Springdale include Springdale Mall, West Mall, and the downtown area on Main Street. A telephone survey has been conducted to identify strengths and weaknesses of these areas and to find out how they fit into the shopping activities of local residents. The 150 respondents were also asked to provide information about themselves and their shopping habits. The data are provided in the file SHOPPING. The variables in the survey can be found in the file CODING.

We will concentrate on variables 18–25, which reflect how important each of eight different attributes is in the respondent’s selection of a shopping area. Each of these variables has been measured on a scale of 1 (the attribute is not very important in choosing a shopping area) to 7 (the attribute is very important in choosing a shopping area). The attributes being rated for importance are listed below. Examining the relative importance customers place on these attributes can help a manager “fine-tune” his or her shopping area to make it a more attractive place to shop.

18 Easy to return/exchange goods

19 High quality of goods

20 Low prices

21 Good variety of sizes/styles

22 Sales staff helpful/friendly

23 Convenient shopping hours

24 Clean stores and surroundings

25 A lot of bargain sales

Perform the following operations for variables 18–25: Compute descriptive statistics (5-number summary, mean, mode, range and standard deviation) for each variable along with an explanation of what the descriptive statistics tell us about the variable. Are there any data points for any of the variables that can be considered outliers? If there are any outliers in any variable, please list them and state for which variable they are an outlier. Use the z-score method to determine any outliers for this question. Based on the results for question 1, which attributes seem to be the most important and the least important in respondents’ choice of a shopping area? Which items from #1 did you use to decide on the least and most important attributes, and why? Determine the correlation coefficient between variable 19 and variables 21 - 25. Please provide an explanation of the relationships.