Descriptive Statistics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Descriptive Statistics - Essay Example The contention behind internal consistency checks is to ensure that the research questions produce consistent responses in the case of the respondents. It is common practice to insert similar questions in research surveys in order to gauge whether respondents answer these questions similarly (Berg, 2001). Research in marketing often entails working with a number of different variables in order to establish the relationship between such variables. Typically the data collected in order to carry out social sciences or marketing research relies in large part on quantitative research backed up by qualitative research to fill out the missing gaps. The use of large sets of quantitative data such as in the current research poses a number of problems in itself. For one thing, there are a number of variables who could be related to each other and may have an impact on the overall hypothesis. Such relationships between variables may pose strong or weak connections in one or more variables that need to be investigated. A preferred method to carry out such investigations is to use a factor analysis (Creswell, 2009) to determine the degree of correlation between various variables. Often a number of variables may be related to each other such that other variables may also exert an influence on the overall relationship. This can only be determined by utilising a proper factor analysis which may be related to but differentiated from principal component analysis (Bartholomew et al., 2008) The current research has focused on eliminating a number of problems from data collection and analysis by relying on factor analysis and internal reliability examinations. Descriptive Statistics Descriptive statistics are utilised in order to describe the major characteristics of a data set (Dodge, 2003). The contention in utilising descriptive statistics is to summarise the data set for analysis. In addition, descriptive statistics ensure that the respondents for a study all fall into the sub group being studied. For example, in the current research the aim is to describe the brand image habits and perceptions of ordinary consumers from the middle class. In this case, descriptive statistics ought to ensure that the respondents come from the middle class in large part or else the responses may be markedly different since the brand perceptions may be markedly different between consumer groups. The major descriptive statistics related to the respondents for the current research are presented in the tables provided below along with explanations. Favorite Brand: Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent Valid APPLE 64 40.3 40.3 40.3 BLACKBERRY 19 11.9 11.9 52.2 HTC 9 5.7 5.7 57.9 LG 2 1.3 1.3 59.1 MOTOROLA 5 3.1 3.1 62.3 NOKIA 20 12.6 12.6 74.8 SAMSUNG 33 20.8 20.8 95.6 SONY ERICSSON 7 4.4 4.4 100.0 Total 159 100.0 100.0 The first issue of importance was to establish which brands consumers subscribed to in connection to the cellular phone market. A number of differen t brands are available that subscribe to the tastes of different market segments so it was important to establish how the current cellular phone market was distributed. The results from the survey indicate clearly that the largest market leader is Apple (40.3%) followed by Samsung (12.6%) although it must be recognised that the proportion of Apple users and Samsung users differs significantly. Nokia (12.6%) and BlackBerry