Course: Research Methodology

Internal Assignment Applicable for September 2023 Examination

Question:1 Introduction
Exploratory research is research conducted to investigate a problem that is not
clearly defined, has been under-investigated, or is otherwise poorly understood.
Often described as grounded theory research, or interpretive research, the approach
is not designed to derive conclusive results, but rather to glean insights that can form
the foundation of future, more specific research.
Exploratory research is the researcher’s tool to understand an issue more
thoroughly, before attempting to quantify mass responses into statistically inferable
data. Conducted in order to determine the nature of the problem, exploratory
research is not intended to provide conclusive evidence, but helps us to have a
better understanding of the problem.
Advantages of Exploratory Research
 Lower costs of conducting the study
 Flexibility and adaptability to change
 Exploratory research is effective in laying the groundwork that will lead to
future studies.
 Exploratory studies can potentially save time by determining at the earlier
stages the types of research that are worth pursuing.
Concepts and application
Ready to Eat food took its own sweet time to enter the Indian market. Today,
apart from manufacturing, India is also exporting ready to eat Indian food.
Ready-to-eat food as animal or plant derived food that is cooked, frozen,
washed, cooked for hot holding, cooled, and processed to be consumed
directly or after heating.
It is a category of convenience food where the preparation time is extremely
short and convenient, to where the product is prepared in advance and can be
eaten as sold depending upon the requirement of the users and the weather
conditions. These foods meet the specific needs of convenience, nutritional
adequacy, shelf stability, storage, distribution to the centres and have become
very popular.
Convenience food, or tertiary processed food, is food that is commercially
prepared (often through processing) to optimise ease of consumption. Such
food is usually ready to eat without further preparation. It may also be easily
portable, have a long shelf life, or offer a combination of such convenient traits.
Convenience foods can include products such as candy; beverages such as
soft drinks, juices and milk; fast food; nuts, fruits and vegetables in fresh or
preserved states; processed meats and cheeses; and canned products such as
soups and pasta dishes. Additional convenience foods include frozen pizza,
Frozen food covers a wide range of ready-to-serve food that requires no
further cooking before they are ready for human consumption. Frozen ready-
to-serve food is served by many food caterers, hotels, restaurants, fast food
chains, food centres. They are also distributed to supermarkets for public
consumption.
Demand for ready-to-eat food is growing fastest in metros where a lot of
working people don't get enough time to cook elaborate meals. According to
retailers, the most popular heat-and-eat items include preparations of paneer,
chana masala, rajma masala and pav bhaji. The demand for tomato puree and
ketchup are commonly-used commodities due to high fluctuations of market
prices of fresh tomatoes. The main categories of packaged food are
canned/dried processed food, frozen processed food, meal replacement
products and condiments.
Convenience food doesn’t require a lot of preparation and is easy for
consumption. Convenience food market comprises ready to cook and ready to
eat products. Among which ready to eat includes frozen foods, chips, bakery
items and others. Whereas ready to cook has been further segmented into
snacks mix, dessert mix and curry mix. Increased consumer awareness
towards ready to mix food in India has changed consumer preferences for food
resources which take less time and energy to prepare. In India, the demand for
Ready-to-cook (RTC) food products has been increasing over the last few
years on account of busier lifestyles and rising income levels of consumers.
This has been consequently providing a huge impetus to RTC food products
market in India, especially over the last five years. The Indian middle class, in
particular, is witnessing a paradigm shift in their lifestyle and living standards.
Presently, nuclear families and bachelors residing in metropolitans for
academic and employment purposes are among the major consumers of RTC
food products. Due to cultural diversities, companies are increasingly focusing
on launching regional RTC products.
Increase in disposable income and consumer preferences for healthy and
convenient food coupled with the rising demand for snacks and fried food
products are expected to further boost the demand for ready-to-eat food
products. In terms of value, the global ready-to-eat food products market is
expected to expand at a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period (2016–2026)
and is estimated to be valued at US$ 195.3 Bn by the end of 2026.
Conclusion
While conducting the research on ready-to-eat products, it is concluded
that most of the females whether married or unmarried or involved in
any profession having the knowledge about ready-to-eat products that are
available in the market for consumption. Some preferred it because they don’t
have enough time for cooking at home whereas some don’t have any
knowledge about its preparation or there can be many other reasons. There
are various reasons behind their purchasing of ready-to-eat products
and also for not purchasing the same.
Question:2 Introduction
Abstract:
Work-life balance is an increasingly integral concern for both individuals and
corporations. An individual has been attempting to achieve balance between his
personal and professional lives for decades. At every stage, the organization plays a
vital role in ensuring that they have all of the resources they required support them
by putting in place innovative policies and initiatives that contribute to a happier life.
Work is an important part of daily life and issues related to work-life balance are
increasing in the present scenario. Equal balance in work and personal life plays an
important role for achieving personal as well as professional goals. The imbalances
in work and personal life have a negative impact on both the aspects of life. Work-life
balance is partly based on employers and partly on individual responsibility.
Introduction
Work balance is founded on the idea that professional work and personal life should
be seen as compatible rather than confrontational in terms of priority. The employer
has taken the conceptualized two-way process method which entails taking into
account their requirements. (Lewis, 2000) Work-life balance is important argument
based on several characteristics such as demographics, societal tendencies, and
economic aims sharing of childcare obligations, major career responsibilities, and
personal responsibilities and interests. The state fluctuates according to the change
in lifestyle and upbringing an individual's priorities. The purpose of the article was to
study the available literature on work-life balance and other variables that included
under work-life balance.
On a daily or regular basis, the right work-life balance of an individual for today will
probably differs in the future. The right balance for a person, when he or she is single
or unmarried will be different from when he or she gets married or when he or she is
nearing retirement. So, it is difficult to predict the work-life balance of every
individual. Goodale et al. (1975) conducted interviews among the public about how
they would define the word ‘quality of life’. The most mentioned that, an element
defining quality of life were individuals’ psychological well-being, the work
environment, working towards one’s aim in their own life and the social surroundings
provided by the people at work place. Objectives of the study
The objectives of this present study are to investigate the previous research work
done on work-life balance, job satisfaction, work stress and negative consequences
of work-life conflict. It provides an understanding on overall concept of the work-life
balance.
1.1 Methodology
This article involves data collected from previous literature available on work life
balance, job satisfaction, work stress and negative consequences of work-life
conflict. The secondary sources of data include data from published sources
(journal) and unpublished sources (internet).
LITERATURE REVIEW
Work-life balance There is no agreement on the definition of work-life balance, as
numerous authors have described it differently. According to Barrera (2007), the
notion is described as employers engaging constructively with their workers to put in
place arrangements that take into consideration the demands of the business as well
as the non-work facets of employees' life. This concept clearly places the burden of
attaining balance on both the employer and the employee. However, other writers
describe it in such a way that the duty for establishing balance is put on the
employee, e.g. Kirchmeyer described it as "achieving rewarding experiences across
all life domains, which needs human resources such as energy, time, and
commitment to be properly dispersed across domains." Greenhaus, Collins, and
Shaw describe it as "the degree to which an individual is involved in and equally
satisfied with his or her professional role and family responsibilities. "Work-life
balance has recently been a major concern for employee well-being. Organizations
strive to maximize profit and, as a result, place a premium on the production
process. Organizations must focus on the total management system's effectiveness
in order to optimize profits in the long run. In this perspective, human resources are
the most important of all the resources on which the organization must focus.
Employee performance
Employee performance is critical in a company since it is a significant variable in
accomplishing organizational goals and objectives. As a result, corporations
investigate numerous methods of motivating their staff. Every policy in a company
should be aimed at boosting employee performance. This is due to the fact that in
order for an organization to stay competitive, it must enhance and monitor the
performance of its staff; failing to do so exposes the business to a number of
obstacles that impede organizational success (Obiageli, Ugochukwu and Ngozi,
2015
Job Satisfaction
Sinha (2013), indicated that the engineers employed in private sectors were more
satisfied with job when compared to those in public sectors. It was revealed that
through correlation analysis, job-satisfaction was significantly (0.01) related with age
and experiences in the case of public sector engineers. But in case of private sector
engineers, no significant correlation was found even at 0.05 level of significance.
Gary Howard et al. (2004), conducted a study among 119 police personnel to
understand the relationship between work-life, life-work and its effect on job
satisfaction. It was found that work-life conflict is important and significantly linked to
job satisfaction in terms of monetary and non-monetary incentives.
Work Stress
According to Aldwin (2007), stress is the "quality of experience created by a person-
environment transaction, which results in psychological or physiological suffering due
to either over arousal or under arousal" (p. 24). While the term distress appears to
exclusively represent anything unpleasant. Furthermore, it argued that stress may be
a constructive (eustress) or harmful (distress) influence in our life. Workload, role
conflict, and interpersonal relationships are factors that lead to stress in employees
when an employee feels stressed, they want to minimize it by proposing to the
business that they construct work-life balance so that they may balance or split their
time between work and family.
On the other hand, if the excitement is coupled with a sense of having little personal
control over one's job, it can have negative psychological and physical implications.
Role conflict may cause stress and have negative consequences such as work
dissatisfaction.
Conclusion
Work-life balance is an emergent issue in the Indian economy. Attaining a good
balance between work and family is a growing concern for fashionable employees
and organisations. In the present scenario, there are many evidence linking work–life
imbalances to reduced health and well being among individuals and families. From
this literature review, many of the demographic factors like age, gender and degree
have a little or no impact on job satisfaction. Employees working in private sector are
more satisfied in their job as compared with the employee working in public sector.
Employees are expecting more opportunities and promotion to enhance their
reputation which they are getting from private sector. If there is an imbalance in the
work-life, then it will give negative consequences which leads to work stress,
absenteeism, decrease in job satisfaction, family conflicts and depression. It is
showed that mood flexibles several times due to working stress and role conflict.
Question:3A)
1. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend ChatGPT to a friend or
colleague?

2. How would you rate the level of support you receive while using ChatGPT?

3. Have you encountered any issues or defects while using ChatGPT? If so,
please describe the issue and any steps you have taken to address it.

4. What are the primary benefits or features that you appreciate about
ChatGPT?

5. How do you first experience ChatGPT and what motivated you to give it a try?

3B) Improving ChatGPT based on feedback from interviews with users is a valuable
approach. Here are five key areas that could be identified through such interviews:

 Fact Accuracy and Knowledge: Users might identify instances where

ChatGPT provides inaccurate or outdated information. Gathering user
 feedback on factual errors can help improve the model's knowledge base and
ensure that it provides reliable information.

 Contextual Understanding: ChatGPT may struggle to maintain context in

longer conversations or when given specific prompts. Users could highlight
cases where the model fails to understand the context correctly, leading to
incorrect or irrelevant responses. Improvements in contextual understanding
would enhance the overall conversation flow.

 Biases and Sensitivity: Interviews could shed light on instances where

ChatGPT exhibits bias, either in terms of gender, race, or other sensitive
topics. User feedback could help identify and mitigate biased or offensive
responses, promoting inclusivity and fairness.

 Handling Ambiguity and Clarification: Users might provide feedback about

the model's ability to handle ambiguous queries or requests for clarification.
Improving ChatGPT's capability to seek clarification or ask for additional
context when faced with ambiguous inputs could lead to more accurate and
relevant responses.

 Ethical and Safety Concerns: Users might express concerns about the
potential misuse of the technology or its ability to generate harmful content.
Collecting feedback on ethical and safety concerns can help researchers
develop better safeguards and guidelines to prevent undesirable outputs.