Solve the following cases :

Q1. The Governing Council of Indraprastha Public School is concerned about the rising
trend of violence in the school. Incidents have come to light that some students even
carry knives and guns to the school. The principal of the school discussed the issues with
the directors in an emergency meeting and discussed how to bring back the school to
its old glory and make it zero-violence school once again. The directors present were also
surprised at the recent trends and were without any clue as to why is it happening. It was
suggested that some background information should be gathered to assess the reality and
to take corrective measures. The Council agreed to conduct a research study and entrust
the job to Indraprastha Market Research Company. The objective was to probe the reasons
why students were bringing knives /guns to the school .The research company, later in a
proposal submitted decided to use focus groups and conduct individual in-depth interviews
to obtain the required information.

a. Which of the above mentioned techniques is suitable for this purpose ? Justify
your answers.
b. IMRC has recommended separate focus groups involving the faculty and also
separate groups for parents. What should be the major areas of issue and how
should the moderators of these groups effectively lead all the participants
through the topic ?
c. What possible questions could be asked in an in-depth interview?
d. Which other methods of research would you suggest and why?
Q2. State the type of experiments being conducted in the following situations. Also identify the
flaws / weaknesses in the design and suggest an improvement.
a.
A group of known smokers are sent literatures on the harmful
effects of smoking on a weekly basis for one year. At the end of the year, a poll is taken
to see how many smokers stopped smoking during the year. The results were used to
establish the effectiveness of this literature campaign in encouraging smokers to stop
smoking.
b. P&G wants to determine if a new package design for Tide is more effective than the
current design .Twelve super markets are randomly selected in a town. In six of them,
randomly selected Tide is sold in the new packaging. In the other six, the old package is
sold. Sales are monitored for three months.

Q3. Match the following:

a.

Telephonic Interviews

1. Qualitative research

b.

Uniform population

2. Questionnaire design

c.

Pre-tests

3. Random sampling

d.

Focus Group

4. Sources of Information

e.

Secondary data

5. Data collection methods