- Hypothesis 3 a – Most people that live outside Bradford prefer to shop at Forster Square rather than Kirkgate Centre
They prefer to shop at Forster Square because the people that come from outside Bradford usually bring a car, rather than depending on unreliable public transport which creates a hassle to travel town to town. Also as Forster Square promotes car transport by the big free car park, I would think that people from smaller cities would need to shop at a place such as Forster Square for its easy accessible stores for their temporary needs of comparison goods, as it is a much easier option than Kirkgate Centre.
- Hypothesis 4 – More younger people would be found at Forster Square than older people
I would think that at Forster Square, a younger population would be found as there are many attractions for the young population. There are attractions such as a fast food restaurant, sport shops and modern clothes shops. Also I would think that older people would find it quite difficult on the whole to get to Forster Square. This would be because as old people suit not to drive, there isn’t many transport links that could take them to Forster Square as it is located on the outskirts of town.
- Hypothesis 5 – Most people that shop at Kirkgate centre / Forster square actually live in Bradford instead of other settlements.
I would think most of the people that shop in both areas would live in Bradford. This is because for them it is obviously close that people traveling from other towns. It is not as practical for people from other towns to shop at Bradford as it is for people from Bradford.
Primary data is data that is collected by an individual to use for a particular purpose. It can be obtained for experiments, investigations, surveys, and in this case through field work which will consist of measurements in terms of paces, questionnaires and observational information. Secondary data is data which is already available or has been collected by someone else for a different purpose. Sources of data include statistics of a study done previously, can be derived from texts, articles, newspapers and even by using the internet.
I will use primary data, which is the data that I will collect through the fieldwork in Bradford. I will collect data in the vicinity of Forster Square Retail Park and in the vicinity of Kirkgate Centre, which are both also located in Bradford. I designed a questionnaire in an attempt to compare the shopping habits. I will ask the reasons for their shopping habits, their method of transport, their preferences, their spending habits, their age, and lastly where the people from both areas are from. Also I made a tally chart so that I could count the people coming in and out of the chain stores in both shopping areas. I also made a tally chart for the pedestrian flows in both shopping areas. In addition a chart is made for the shop frontage of the chain stores measuring them by my average pace across the length and width of the room, also considering the amount of floors present.
In my questionnaire I will ask a number of questions. The age will be important as they always are in interviews to find out personal details of the representative of the sample. The city that the person lives in is used for sub hypothesis 3 a. The question which asks where they shopped on the day of the interview is used for every single hypothesis. The question which follows gives me an idea of the reasons why they normally shop at one place. The next question asks how frequently they shop at Forster Square followed by a question, which asks how frequently they shop at Kirkgate Centre. Both of these questions will be used for hypothesis 2 a. Question 7 which asks how much is spent by the customers at both shopping areas, is tested for hypothesis 2. The next question is used to give me an idea of which chain store people like to shop at. On my questionnaire I will use a tick the answer structure although I had two other questions accepting any additional reasons for understanding the study in more depth. I used this sort of structure so that the questionnaires can be answered by the representatives of my sample, quickly and without any hassle.
I obtained 60 completed questionnaires without working in a group but independently. I obtained 30 questionnaires in the vicinity of Forster Square Retail Park and the rest in the vicinity of Kirkgate Centre. I did actually plan to do 200 questionnaires but there were reasons for this change in the plan, and I will explain this later. The questionnaires will be done from half past 9 in the morning to 1 o’clock in the afternoon. It will be done on the Monday 18th October. The questionnaires are meant to be done inside Kirkgate Shopping Centre and around the entrances and exits of the shops at Forster Square. As I plan to do random sampling, I will select any random person that comes out of the complex or any of the shops at Forster Square. This will be classed as random sampling as I probably will not recognize anybody or particularly choose anybody.
After completing the field trip many problems were encountered. I was meant to do my questionnaires inside the complex of Kirkgate Shopping Centre but it had to be done at the entrance and exit of the shopping complex. This is because the security guards did not allow for people to be interviewed inside the complex for health and safety reasons. As the fieldwork was on a weekday I came across fewer people in the ‘less than 20’ age group than I would have if it was a weekend. This is because people from that age group were at school at the time that I had to do my questionnaires. This means that it was actually biased towards other age groups. As there were a high number of people that worked in the town centre, when I came across them they didn’t want to spend any time being interviewed as they wanted to spend their lunch break peacefully. As I started interviewing people rather early in the day, I came across a considerable amount of old people as the younger population was either at school or busy working in town. This was also where the age group was biased, towards old people. I experienced many refusals to be interviewed in the day. Most of the people who were shopping weren’t generous enough to spare a small amount of time to fill in a questionnaire of mine. There was even a man who volunteered to be interviewed but then decided to walk away, assuming it would be rather comical to. I came across a few truants in the day, and one of them also volunteered to be interviewed, but was answering untruthfully and was trying to make a mockery of my questionnaires. I certainly found a lack of people to interview so early in the day. I came across one person who found it noticeably very difficult to communicate in English fluently. As he was unable to complete the questionnaire he apologized and decided to not participate in the interview. Because of this another questionnaire was abandoned therefore I had to repeat yet another random sample and find another representative of my sample. At one point in the day I came across a problem with my questionnaire. There was a question that didn’t apply to the representatives. The question asked how much was spent at Forster Square, but the person had never shopped at Forster Square in his life. For the question I had to tick the box ‘less than 10 pounds spent’ so then the data would not be mixed up. If there was something I could have changed in my methodology, it would be to do my questionnaires at a later time in the day, preferably at 1-4 o’clock in the afternoon. This is because the younger age groups would then start to finish school and could start to be found in any of the two shopping areas. Also the working population would then start to finish at their workplace between those times.
For the shop flow, I had to stand outside counting all the people that came out of the chain stores, and the people that were going inside them. I waited for 5 minutes outside each store. Counting people going in both directions proved to be quite difficult but I decided to go in a group for the second part of the day. I thought it would be a good idea to compare the shop flow at JJB, Argos and Boots at both areas, as there wouldn’t be a big difference in stock but there would be a difference due to the location. I chose the time between 2 till quarter past 3. I did both shopping areas around the same time to keep it an accurate comparison.
After completing my shop flow I stood around the pedestrian flows near both shopping areas for 5 minutes each and I counted pedestrians as they walked past. I would have changed my plan and spent 30 minutes at each location but time was running out on the day. I chose these data collection methods so late in the day, around the time where children started to break up from their school.
I didn’t encounter any problems in my observation while doing the shop flows and pedestrian flows.
In order to measure the size of the chain stores inside each shopping centre, I had to take my average pace and walk across the length and width of each store. I did encounter a few problems along the way as there were people coming in the way while I was counting my paces across the length and the width of the room. I also found it difficult as there were shelves and counters in the way of my walk. I measured the shop frontage straight after I did my observational experiments.
- Hypothesis 1- The biggest chain stores attract the most people
Figure 1- proportional circles that represent the size of chain stores in comparison to one another
Figure 2
Figure 1 shows how proportional circles that represent the size of chain stores in comparison to one another. Figure 2 shows a table of the amount of people that went into chain stores at both areas. Overall there were more people altogether found going in and out of Kirkgate Centre’s stores. It was found that there were more people going in and out of the Kirkgate Centre’s Argos and Boots rather than the Forster Square’s Argos and Boots. But there was in fact more people going in and out Forster Square’s JJB than Kirkgate Centre’s JJB. I think the size of the store matters and this is a very big factor which attracts the customers to the store. Figure 3 shows the sizes of each store measured my very own paces. It shows that Boots at Kirkgate Centre was more than triple the size at Forster Square. It shows that JJBs at Forster Square is bigger than the one at Kirkgate Centre. It also shows that Argos is bigger at Kirkgate Centre than it is at Forster Square. This proves that the size of the shop does matter as there were more people at all of the bigger stores. I was actually expecting less people at the JJBs in Kirkgate Centre. This is because this store is fairly new and replaced another store in Kirkgate Centre; so many customers would not be used seeing the store there.
Figure 3
- Sub Hypothesis 1 a – There will be higher number of pedestrians at the flow near Kirkgate centre rather than the flow near Forster Square
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 4 is a bar chart which shows the amount of pedestrians noted down in the space of 5 minutes. Figure 5 shows the figures in a table of the pedestrians. They both show that there were more people found at Kirkgate Centre than there were at Forster Square. It was actually in the afternoon that I did the pedestrian count. They were both done within 10 minutes of each other to get a fair comparison. I would think that there were more people found near Kirkgate Centre as because it is in the centre of town. There not only was Kirkgate Centre in the town centre but there were actually lots of other shops including comparison as well as convenient goods stores. There is even public transport that goes into the centre of town which is one of the key factors. In Forster Square there were actually only 49 people compared to 67 at Kirkgate Centre. This shows that the lack of services and shops and public transport near Forster Square means that there are less people that are willing to be found on foot. So these results prove my hypothesis quite strongly, but I would say there is an anomaly in the figure for the people found near Forster Square as I was expecting less people to be found than I actually did. This is because the pedestrian point that I had used was actually very close to the car park, so it could have been the people going to or coming from their car as well as people that walked it to Forster Square from the centre of town.
- Hypothesis 2 – The further the shoppers travel, the more they spend
Figure 6
Sphereman’s rank to show if the money spent by each shopper is proportional to the distance they live from Bradford Town
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Figure 6 shows a table for the distances of every settlement from the two shopping centers. Figure 7 shows a table that involves sphereman’s rank which has 10 randomly picked people out of my questionnaires. In the table the people that spent the least which was about 0-20 pounds, came from places very close to the town centre. For example the 4th random person that I picked spent less that 10 pounds and was from Bradford. So he had less of a distance to travel, therefore he spent less. In the table, we can see that people who spent more money seemed to be from further away. For example the 7th random guy picked in the list who spent in the region of 36-49 pounds was from Ilkley that was a considerable distance to travel but it was a large quantity of money. After using the formula which is shown above, I got 0.81. This means that there is a high correlation present in my results as it is quite near enough to 1. This means that the amount of money spent by the shoppers is proportional to the distance they live from the city centre. This means that my hypothesis has been proved. I would think that people would spend more money when live further away, because the cost of traveling is quite expensive. It wouldn’t be practical to come to Bradford just to spend 5 pounds if you live more than 10 kilometers away. And people from smaller towns than Bradford, i.e. Bingley, would want to spend a considerably high amount of money because they don’t get the same sort of services in their town.
- Sub Hypothesis 2 a – Most shoppers would shop more frequently at Kirkgate Centre than Forster Square
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 8 and 9 show how frequently people shop at both Kirkgate Centre and Forster Square. Figure 9 shows the data as a cylindrical chart whereas Figure 10 shows a table with the data. There are 34 people at Kirkgate Centre and 36 people at Forster Square who shop less than 2 times a week. Most of the people said they shopped less than 2 times a week. In Kirkgate Centre 15 people said they shop 2-4 times a week whereas there were fairly more people at Forster Square that shopped 2-4 times a week. At Kirkgate Centre there were 6 people that shopped 5-6 times a week whereas less than half that at Forster Square. At Forster Square only 1 person shopped 7 times or more a week, whereas in comparison there was a high number of 5 at Kirkgate Centre. My hypothesis was proved and the results supported it very strongly. I would think that there are more people that shop less times a week at Forster Square as it is on the outskirts of the town, and there aren’t many shops to visit. People would go there to buy something specifically rather than go there to look around. As there were more people a Kirkgate Centre that shopped there more times a week, this meant that they either worked in the town centre therefore finding it fairly easily to go to look around at Kirkgate Centre at their lunch break. I can say this as the time I actually did the questionnaires in the vicinity of Kirkgate Centre; the time was fairly near lunch time. There could also have been people that wanted to have a good time, and therefore wanted to look around Kirkgate Centre because of it having a nice café and a huge selection of shops on the 2 floors. I don’t think there were any anomalies except that I expected more people in Forster Square to shop less that 2 times a week.
- Hypothesis 3 – Most shoppers travel to Forster Square by car rather than using any other form of transport
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 10 shows a pie chart and Figure 11 shows a table of how the shoppers interviewed on the day got to Forster Square. There were 18 people that traveled by car, 4 people that got there by foot and 6 people that got there by train. There were 2 people that got there by bus and there was only 1 person that got there by taxi. These results support the hypothesis very strongly. This is because Forster Square has a very big car park, and the big factor is that the car park is free. This shows that Forster Square is promoting car transport. The people that came by foot were probably people that lived in the flats near the train station. The people by train probably came by before they went to work, as I did do my questionnaires in the early morning. There was only one bus that came anywhere near Forster Square but that came from Heaton. Even that bus was a 5 minute walk therefore making it hard for older people. I would say there was one anomaly as I was actually expecting less people to be found that were traveling by foot, but I coincidentally came across a few people that actually lived in the flat blocks near Forster Square.
- Hypothesis 3 a – Most people that live outside Bradford prefer to shop at Forster Square rather than Kirkgate Centre
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 12 shows a table and Figure 13 shows a column chart for the preferences of the shoppers’ favorite area. What I discovered was that, people from Bradford liked to shop at Kirkgate Centre more shopping at Forster Square. There were 20 people that liked shopping at Kirkgate Centre and 8 that liked shopping at Forster Square. Also people from outside Bradford preferred shopping at Forster Square to Kirkgate Centre. What the figures show is that there were 20 people that liked to shop at Forster Square and there were 12 people that liked to shop at Kirkgate Centre. These results do generally support my hypothesis but the anomaly is that not many people as much as they said they did would prefer shopping at Kirkgate Centre that lived outside Bradford. There were 12 people that did prefer shopping at Kirkgate Centre and I think this figure is a bit too much. I would think that more people from outside Bradford wouldn’t like Kirkgate Centre as much because it would take them time to get into Bradford, which would be by public transport or even worse by car. Then they would have to face the traffic congestion in the centre of town to go to the Kirkgate Centre car park which would cost a fair bit. So this would be a time consuming trip as well as an expensive one. The people that did prefer Kirkgate Centre that lived outside Bradford probably used public transport as the interchange isn’t too far from the centre of town. The people that preferred to shop at Forster Square that lived outside Bradford probably traveled by car as then they could have stopped on the outskirts of town and faced a peaceful journey, and then they could have got whatever they would have needed from Forster Square and then making their ways home. The people that lived in Bradford probably preferred Kirkgate Centre because they could have either had a job in the town centre or they could have spent a full day in Kirkgate Centre without bothering to bring their car as the bus transport has been improved lately, with an ever expanding amount of bus lanes throughout the city. This public transport cannot reach Forster Square therefore making it hard to get there for very old people who couldn’t drive.
- Hypothesis 4 – More younger people would be found at Forster Square than older people
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 14 shows a clustered column and Figure 15 shows a table that both show the age of people at both shopping areas. There were younger people in the age group of less than 20, found at Forster Square than there were at Kirkgate Centre. There were 8 people less than 20 at Forster Square while there were 3 at Kirkgate Centre. There were 17 people in the age group 20-40 years of age at Forster Square while only 7 at Kirkgate Centre. Altogether in the 2 age groups combined there were 5 people that were found in the age group 41+ at Forster Square while there were a mammoth 20 people found at Kirkgate Centre. This generally shows that there were more people at Forster Square for the younger generations whereas more people at Kirkgate Centre for the older generations. I think the results are quite accurate and there doesn’t seem to be any anomalies. The results fully support the hypothesis and very strongly. The reason for the younger population shopping at Forster Square rather than Kirkgate Centre is because there are many shops favoring their age groups. There are a couple of sport shops and a computer shop and even one of the leading fashionable shops such as Next. These shops are quite big compared to similar ones in Kirkgate Centre; therefore these shops are largely favored by the young and working population. There were 20 people found at Kirkgate Centre that were at a considerably old age. I would think that thy shop there as public transport would take them in the town centre, and therefore leaving them not far to walk. If these old people came from outside Bradford then they could also come by train or bus as the interchange is fairly near the town centre. This public transport would not reach Forster Square as it is located in an awkward location on the outskirts of town. Therefore there was a very little amount of people in that age group that shopped at Forster Square. The older population would hardly of the position to drive therefore have to be dependant on public transport.
Hypothesis 5 – Most people that shop at Kirkgate centre / Forster square actually live in Bradford instead of other settlements.
Figure 16 Proportional flow lines showing the amount of people from each city
Key
1 person
3 people
7 people
10 people
13 people
23 people
Figure 17
Figure 16 shows proportional flow lines representing the amount of people from each city found on the field trip. Figure 17 shows a table with the figures of the numbers of people and the working for the proportional flow lines. As we can see the most people are from Bradford. There are 23 people from Bradford, 13 people from Ilkley, 10 from Shipley, 1 person from Leeds, 7 people from Bingley, 3 people from Pudsey and 3 people from Keighley. This shows that my hypothesis has been proved. I would think that most people would be from Bradford because the town centre is has easier accessibility the closer the settlement to it. And in this case, being in Bradford you would expect the most people to be from there. There is only 1 person from Leeds as Leeds is 17 Km away from the town centre which is quite far indeed, and this shopping trip to Bradford would have been very difficult to get into and out of the town centre.
Figure 18 shows a map with circles showing the distance settlements are from Bradford
After setting myself some objectives in my investigation I chose to do a few hypotheses. I realized a couple of things after doing my fieldwork such as, size depends on the attendance of each chain store, and people would go to a store depending on the size of it. I found out that there will be more pedestrians found at Kirkgate Centre because it is located in the centre of town whereas Forster Square is located on the outskirts of town and promotes cars rather than pedestrians. Also about spending money, money is only spent at Forster Square if something is needed therefore higher amounts of money is spent there. In Kirkgate Centre people tend to go there to enjoy their day out and to window shop, to look around and to have a good time therefore a lower amount of money is spent. Most shoppers would more frequently go to Kirkgate Centre because of it being easy access in the centre of town, can be enjoyable with the huge amount of shops inside it, and a place to relax on lunch breaks at the café. Also cars are used more at Forster Square rather than any other form of transport as it has a big free car park and is located on the outskirts of town therefore; easy to find the motorway from Forster Square. They much prefer this to the hassle of Kirkgate Centre which has a lot of traffic congestion in the town centre. This is also why people from outside Bradford prefer to shop at Forster Square because of such a peaceful journey. People from Bradford much prefer to shop at Kirkgate Centre as it is in the town centre and also it is near many other decent shops in the town centre. Young people like Forster Square as it has the shops that they would much prefer. It has sport shops, a computer shop, and even one of the leading modern day fashion shops. Not only are these the shops ideal for teenagers and working aged people, but they all are fairly big. Old people find Kirkgate Centre more convenient because of it having public transport right next to it and also there is a huge variety of shops for them to choose from. Also I realized that most of the people that I interviewed were from the Bradford District except only a few that were from the Leeds district. My investigation has been quite successful as I was able to achieve my objectives, by comparing the two shopping areas. I wanted to use a bigger sample size as big as 500, but time was off the essence, and 500 questionnaires would take a month. This would give me less time to explore each area of the project but it would give us a better idea of the peoples’ shopping habits. Also with the population of Bradford being around the 100,000 mark, a much bigger sample than 60 is needed. The questionnaires in Forster Square were done roughly 9-11 and the questionnaires in Kirkgate Centre were roughly done 11-1. This wasn’t a precise comparison as one was done at breakfast while the other was done at lunch time. Also another reason why the comparison wasn’t fair was because people were at school, and there was a age group missing in town. Also while doing the shop flows and pedestrian flows, it took time to walk to and fro to each shopping area, so this being another unfair part of my methodology. I could have done things differently if I had two days in the holidays to do carry out my fieldwork, therefore I would be able to compare each part of my methodology on different days. I would do the fieldwork got to do with Kirkgate Centre on one day and the fieldwork got to do with Forster Square on another day as this would make it very fair. I think I should have had a few of my objectives combined to show a specific area of the project I would like to concentrate on. There were 9 objectives which were pretty short and they were looking at different areas of the study. If I had more time I would make an extension to this project. I would review the effect of Kirkgate Centre on the rest of town. This would show whether Kirkgate Centre is more of an attraction to the shoppers or the shops around the town centre attract more people. This would be a perfect hypothesis to my project and I would learn a lot more bout my town.
Bibliography:
www.multimap.com
