EXAM STUDY GUIDE
MKTG 301 MARKETING RESEARCH
CHAPTER 1 & 2 MARKETING RESEARCH and PROBLEM DEFINITION
1. What are the steps involved in Marketing Research?
2. What is the difference between a management decision problem and a marketing research
problem? Also, understand the difference between symptoms and problems
3. What are research questions and hypothesis?
CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH DESIGN & SECONDARY DATA
1. What are basic types of research designs? Their essential characteristics?
2. What are the methods associated with the research designs in (1)?
3. What is the difference between cross sectional and longitudinal designs?
4. What is the difference between primary and secondary data? What are the advantages and
disadvantages of each?
5. What criteria should be used to evaluate secondary data?
6. What are some sources of secondary data?
Look into: syndicated services, panels, scanner data ...
CHAPTER 4 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
1. What is qualitative research?
2. Essential features in terms of sample used, data collection, data analyses, type of questions
and generalizability?
3. What are focus groups? What are their benefits and limitations?
4. What are in-depth interviews? What is probing? What are their benefits and limitations?
5. What are projective techniques? What is the essential idea behind p.t?
What are the benefits and disadvantages of using projective techniques?
6. What is ethnographic research?
CHAPTER 5 SURVEY and OBSERVATION
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the survey vs. observation?
You should be able to suggest survey or observation for a certain project.
2. What are the different methods of data collection (contact methods) in survey research?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
3. What are some methods we can use to improve survey response rate?
4. What are decisions involved in observation?
CHAPTER 6 EXPERIMENTATION & CAUSAL RESEARCH
1. What are the conditions for causality?
2. What are test units, independent variables, dependent variables, and extraneous variables
in an experimental design?
Make sure you understand the essential difference between descriptive and causal designs.
3. What is internal validity and external validity in experimentation?
4. How can extraneous variables be controlled?
5. What is the difference between pre-experimental designs and true experimental designs?
6. Be familiar with experimental designs: one-shot case study, one group pretest-posttest
design, static group design, pretest-posttest control group design, posttest only control
group design.
7. Difference between laboratory and field designs.
8. What is an interaction effect?
9. What is the difference between within and between-subjects designs?
CHAPTERS 7 MEASUREMENT AND SCALING
1. What is measurement?
2. Primary scales of measurement (types of variables): nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio
scales.
Understand the type of data analyses doable for each type.
3. Different types of comparative and con-comparative scales, and their advantages and
disadvantages.
4. Why do we need multiple item scales?
5. What is measurement error? Difference between random error and systematic error.
6. What is validity and reliability in measurement?
CHAPTER 8 QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN
1. Understand the tradeoff between unstructured (open ended) and structured (closed-ended)
questions
2. Understand the rationale behind the typical question sequence.
3. Look at the slides for common mistakes in wording and questioning.
CHAPTER 9 SAMPLING
1. What is a population, census and a sample?
2. What is a sampling frame?
3. What sampling error vs. nonsampling error?
4. What are the non-probability sampling techniques?
5. What are the probability sampling techniques?
6. Make sure you understand the essential idea behind the techniques and could apply them
within an example.
