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

1. Perform the following operations for variables 18–25:
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
2. 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?
3. Determine the correlation coefficient between variable 19 and variables 21 – 25. Please provide an explanation of the relationships.

Paper Requirements

Write a report that applies the Written Assignment Requirements under the heading Expectations for CSU-Global Written Assignments found in the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA Requirements. Items that should be included, at a minimum, are a title page, an introduction, a body which answers the questions posed in the problem, and a conclusion paragraph that addresses your findings and what you have determined from the data and your analysis. As with all written assignments, you should have in-text citations and a reference page too. Please include any tables of calculations, calculated values and graphs associated with this problem in the body of your assignment response.

NOTE: You MUST submit your Excel file with your report. This will aid in grading with partial credit if errors are found in the report.