SPSS Essay Example

A hotel in the hospitality and tourism industry intends to go ahead with plans to improve its delivery of service to the market segments defined by the management in the five year marketing plan detailed out recently. Apart from the regular feedback that it usually obtains from its clients from time to time, the sales and marketing department feels that there is need to carry out a market research so as to understand how the clients view their prices in relation to services offered.

Design of questionnaire

A questionnaire that is intended to capture this information is designed. The questions that are in the questionnaire and a description of the variables and its use are included below. The questionnaire is designed to capture no information that may lead to the identification of the client. Therefore, the responses captured will in most cases be genuine because the client will feel more confident to express their opinion when no judgment will be made against them. The questions in the questionnaire are;

What is your age?

What is your gender?
How do you rate the quality of service we offer?
How do you rate our price in relation to the quality of service above? A high percentage indicates that you feel that the price is worth the quality of service.

Which service do you consider the best delivered?

Which service do you consider the worst in the quality of its delivery?
The coded system is defined in the graphs attached.
The questions on the age and the gender of respondents is intended to capture information on who constitutes a greater percentage of the hotel’s clientele. This will be important especially in cases where the hotel intends to advertise. The information captured will assist the hotel in deciding how best to reach its target population.
We expect that the quality of service and perception of the price are correlated. These two variables are captured in percentage so as to obtain the most out of the information given by clients. Capturing the information in percentage allows variables under consideration to be treated as a quantitative variable. Analysis of quantitative variables allows the application of statistical tools that increase the validity of the analysis.
The last two questions will capture information that will assist the hotel in improving its services. This also allows the relevant departments that is the best performing and the worst performing to decide how best they can improve service delivery through learning from each other.

The SPSS file used in the analysis is attached.

Frequencies command
Descriptive command
The mean age of the respondents is 45 years with a standard deviation of 16, this means that the average customer of the hotel will most probably be 45 years. On average, the clients of the hotel consider the quality of the service to be 52 with a standard deviation of 17.6. the price of the service in relation to the quality of service offered is 54 with a standard deviation of 18. Although these figures are above average, the management of the hotel should strive to make these percentages above 75% so as to be on the safe side from competition. The standard deviation measures how far the values used in the computation of the mean are dispersed. The standard deviation of these mean value should be as small as possible. The minimum, maximum, range and interquartile range measure the dispersion of the values from the mean. The skewness is a measure of how the shape of the distribution is skewed. A zero skew indicates that the distribution is symmetrical for example a normal distribution. A positive skew indicates that the distribution is skewed to the right. Kurtosis is a measure of the peakedness of a distribution.

Chi-square test

The variable age is recoded, it is included in the SPSS file attached as Age_Category.
There is need to establish how the perception of the best service offered by the hotel differ across the different ages of the respondents. Therefore, we recode the variable age so that the significance of our comparison can be obtained using a relevant statistical test. The Pearson p-value 0.724 which is greater than 0.5, thus we conclude that the test is insignificant at 95% confidence level. The statistical test is not significant thus we fail to reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis.

A frequency command for the recoded variable is included below.

The frequencies indicate that the first three categories constitute 67% of the age categories and as such most of the respondents will fall in these categories.

Chi square test.

The chi-square test is significant thus we reject the null hypothesis which postulate that there is no significant difference in the perception of the best service offered across the categories of age. I therefore, conclude that there is a significant difference between the perception of the different categories of age and the service that is offered by the hotel. The alternative hypothesis is favored and it is expected that the perception of the best service offered by the hotel differs in the categories of age considered.
In conclusion, the hotel can use the results of the analysis to decide how it will market its products and also how it will handle its market segmentation. The perceptions of price and quality are especially important. The average age of respondents can also be used by the hotel to know its target population. This will be used in its advertising plans when the company needs to improve its sales or during introduction of new products.