Education
December 2002
Snap has had a long association with academic establishments, business schools and colleges. The two case studies we present here are typical of the many universities and teaching establishments where Snap is used both as a powerful tool for researchers and as a means to teach the practicalities of the research process to students of marketing research or business studies.
Project work, based on a practical assignment using Snap, not only gives students first hand experience of the practicalities of the survey process, but can provide insight for more theoretical discussions on topics such as representative sampling, response rates and analytical techniques.
For students on marketing on business studies courses, where Snap is the means to the end and not the end in itself, it is a real advantage that the program can be picked up quickly by students and goes the full mile in terms of undergraduate and postgraduate research requirements. Not surprisingly, many of today’s professional Snap users are those who first experienced Snap when at college or university.
Snap is the Business at UWE
The University of the West of England, situated in Bristol, UK, has a large business school with a strong focus on marketing research. All Business School students, as well as academic staff and research fellows, have access to the Snap software on the university’s computer network. In a typical year, hundreds of students will use Snap to design questionnaires, manage quantitative surveys and analyze the results. For the students, Snap fulfils two fundamental needs: that it is both quick to learn and easy to use, and by using it, they gain valuable practical insights into the subject they are studying.
From a teaching viewpoint, students clearly get a lot out of it because it brings alive the whole concept of questionnaire design. And Snap is very user-friendly for cross-tabs, which encourages students to think about the analysis - such as to think about subgroups and ways of presenting the results.
Clive Nancarrow, Professor of Marketing Research at UWE, sees many advantages for his students: "From a teaching viewpoint, students clearly get a lot out of it because it brings alive the whole concept of questionnaire design. And Snap is very user-friendly for cross-tabs, which encourages students to think about the analysis - such as to think about subgroups and ways of presenting the results. Of course, it does not take away the need to think carefully about encouraging good response, so they must also think about ways to encourage those approached to participate."
Snap is routinely used by undergraduates where some primary research is involved as a part of their project work. It is also regularly used within an assessed coursework exercise into how marketing research can be used to address a business problem. Students use Snap to design a realistic questionnaire that would be used in the research solution being proposed: it is often their first exposure to Snap.
"There is usually a gasp in the class as people realize how good the questionnaire they have designed actually looks," said Professor Nancarrow. "It means our students take a lot more pride in what they are producing. When you are watching students working on Snap you can see the enthusiasm it triggers."
Occasionally, students will also use Snap when conducting research on the telephone. Snap’s different data capture modes means students can key in the responses as they go, or record them on paper and enter them later.
Snap is also used by postgraduates and academic staff in the department, for their research. In this area Snap’s Internet capabilities are proving to be particularly useful. Prof. Nancarrow is currently engaged in an international research project across 27 countries using a Snap Web-based questionnaire translated into four languages. Respondents are invited by e-mail to participate and directed to the survey Web page.
"The difference Snap makes is quite simply being able to do this kind of large scale survey. If you can direct people to a website, it makes for a very economical way to collect data. It does open up a whole new avenue for data collection."
Snap’s simplicity wins at the University of Strathclyde
All 200 undergraduates on Strathclyde’s marketing degree programme have the opportunity to experience Snap hands-on, as a part of their course on market research. The course, in the students’ third semester, includes a group assignment, which involves preparing, and taking into the field, a quantitative survey. Questionnaire design is demonstrated in one lecture, then in a lab session, the design and set up the questionnaire they will use for the interviews they start work on setting up the questionnaire, using the survey design module.
The main benefit of using Snap is its simplicity for teaching. Once you have learnt it, it is really very useful for all kinds of survey work.
Course lecturer, Dr Stephen Tagg, commented "The main benefit of using Snap is its simplicity for teaching. Once you have learnt it, it is really very useful for all kinds of survey work."
Working in five groups of around 40, the students carry out interviews, then enter the data into Snap. In a second lab session, the students prepare the results. "At this point, they also have to learn how to export their tables into Word to create a report," said Dr Tagg. "Snap is good because you can do all this – and over the years, it has got better at it, too."
Snap also features in some of the department’s postgraduate courses and on Strathclyde’s Masters in Marketing programme, where six weeks are devoted to research technology and software. This includes one week on questionnaire design using Snap, and another week on using Snap for analysis. "We also cover exporting Snap into the SPSS statistical software," Dr Tagg reported. "Snap’s ability to do this is very important, as Honours students and postgraduates will often want to go on to perform significance tests or carry out some factor analysis."
As the University has become involved in some national research projects, Dr Tagg has also found Snap a great help. He said: "We have just concluded two waves of the recent Federation of Small Businesses Survey into barriers to growth, with about 20,000 participants. Some were done by post and others were done on the Internet, and a phone option was offered for inbound. It was very useful that Snap could work across all these different methods."
In another project, on social entrepreneurs, Dr Tagg worked in collaboration with colleagues at other universities. "They had Snap licences, so we were able to pass the survey files between us in Snap. It was particularly useful for revising the different versions when we were reaching agreement on the final questionnaire."
As a researcher at heart, Dr Tagg particularly likes the wealth of reliable data he is able to accumulate, with relatively little effort, and which he can then reanalyze either within or outside of Snap. "When you collect the survey on the web, you get a lot of other interesting data too, such as when they completed the survey and how long they took. You’d be amazed at how many people complete these surveys at 2 o’clock in the morning," he remarked.
The benefits of Snap to universities and colleges
Snap offers some particular advantages to educational establishments teaching survey-based research methods. As both UWE and Strathclyde have discovered, having the software available in the lab really brings the subject to life, and saves valuable time on the course too. It even means research projects can be more ambitious than in the past, because they are less constrained by the sheer effort of the process.
These benefits include:
- The Snap software is easily taught and quickly learned.
- High quality questionnaire output provides credibility – ensures the work gets taken seriously.
- Choice of research methods: face-to-face, telephone and even Internet, from the same program.
Internet module makes it easy and inexpensive to sample far and wide, nationally or even internationally. - Integrated cross-tabs, charts and statistics mean that rigorous analysis can be carried out directly by students.
- Easy export to SPSS, another package widely used in education, for advanced statistical analysis.
- Networked licences and educational pricing means Snap can be implemented very cost-effectively in universities and colleges.
- All of the software’s capabilities are also available for academic staff and research fellows to use for both large and small-scale research projects.
All in all, it means the focus can shift from the process of doing the research, to the analysis and interpretation of the findings: which is, after all, what research is really about.