- Why have you come to this particular shop?
I needed to know this because I wanted to see if there was a trend in the reasons for this answer and the size of the shop they had gone to (e.g. people would give the reason “I’m just looking around” at the smaller shops because they are more specialist and offer products for a smaller range of people).
- How much are you planning to spend?
I needed to know this because I wanted to see if people spent more money in the larger shops as opposed to the smaller shops.
- Do you feel that you get enough assistance from the staff who work in the shop?
I needed to know this because I wanted to see if the larger shops had better assistance from staff (e.g. to keep a good image amongst the customers).
- How often do you come here?
I needed to know this because hypothesis 1c was to find out if people from the local area were more likely to come more frequently to the shops as opposed to those living further away.
How and when was it collected?
This was how I collected all the data, in the order that I did it in:
Questionnaire – 13:00
Whenever I asked someone a question with a list of possible answers, hardly any of them said “Other”, which showed that these questions had well enough possible answers for most of the interviewees and they did not need to think for a long time for an answer, instead at least one the possible options applied to them. Here are the questions:
- Which town or village have you come from?
For this question, I simply wrote down which town or village they came from.
- Which mode(s) of transport did you use to get here?
For this question, I simply wrote down which mode of transport they used.
- Approximately, how long did it take you to get here?
For this question, I simply wrote down how long it took them to get to the shop.
- Why have you come to this particular shop?
For this question, I gave each interviewee 5 options to choose from which were “Cheap”, “Good quality”, “Accessible”, “I’m just looking around” and “Other”. If one of them said “Other”, I would write down what reason they gave.
- How much are you planning to spend?
For this question, I simply wrote down how much they were planning to spend.
- Do you feel that you get enough assistance from the staff who work in the shop?
For this question, I gave each interviewee 3 options which were “Yes”, “No” and “Don’t know”.
- How often do you come here?
For this question, I gave each interviewee 6 options to choose from which were “More than once a week”, “Once a week”, “Once a month”, “Once a year”, “Hardly ever” and “Other”. If one person said other, I would write down the answer they gave.
I also included at the bottom, something which I filled in, which was the sex of the interviewee and their approximate age. For this, I simply wrote “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9”, so for example, if I thought someone was in their 30s, I would circle the number “3”.
Size of the shop – 16:00
To measure the size of the shop without using a tape measure, I walked both horizontally and vertically across each shop. I made sure that every step I took was the same length. I counted how many steps it took for me to get from one side of the shop to another. When I got back home, I then measured how long one of my steps was. I then multiplied this by the number of steps I took, and then calculated the area of each shop.
Amount of people entering and leaving – 16:25
I stood just inside the shop and counted the amount of people entering and leaving each shop for 3 minutes. I did not count each of them separately (i.e. I counted the amount of people entering and leaving both in the same period of 3 minutes).
Bi-polar analysis: - 16:45
For the bi-polar analysis, for each shop, I stood in front of the shop and turned 360o and then gave a score from 1 to 7 for each description (i.e. cheerful to depressing etc). I then counted the total for each shop.
Photos – 17:10
I took a photograph of each shop from the outside. I made sure that the whole shop could be seen, to check the size of each shop, and also made sure that I could see the surroundings of the shop (e.g. was it on a main street or indoors).
Data Presentation
This graph clearly shows that as the size of the shop increases, the average distance people are prepared to travel to get to the shop increases. This is because the larger shops probably have a larger range of products available. This means that more people will be able to find the right product that they want as there will be a greater chance of finding the product that they want in the larger shops.
This pie chart shows a breakdown of the times it took for the interviewees to arrive at the small shop. The chart clearly shows that for more than half the people, it took them less than one minute to get to the shop. This chart proves my analysis of the previous graph more graphically and it is easy to see that people are prepared to travel less distances to get to the small shop.
This shows the times it took for people to get to the medium sized shop. The times are a lot more spread out than for the small shop, which means that people are prepared to travel for a slightly longer time to get to the medium sized shop.
This chart shows the times it took for people to get to the large shop. It is clear that more people are prepared to travel for a longer time to get to the large shop. This clearly shows that the larger the shop, the longer people are prepared to travel to get to that shop.
This graph shows that the majority of people going to the small shop do so by either walking or using the bus. These are mainly used for short distances and are also relatively cheap. This shows that people want to use cheaper modes of transport to get to the smaller shops as they do not want to spend too much money getting to a small shop which will probably sell very few products.
Evaluation
Overall, I felt that my whole fieldwork went well and that I was able to obtain reliable results. However, there were a number of things which I felt that I could have improved on to make them even more reliable.
One thing which I could have improved on would have been to question more people. This would have increased my sample and thus improve my results further. The reason for this would have been that by questioning more people, I would have got more results, which would have also made it easier to make conclusions as the correlations between the different results would have been more profound.
The reason that my sample was different was that it would have taken too long to question extra people, and it may have meant that I needed to continue the fieldwork on another day and the number of people in a shopping centre can vary dramatically during different days. Therefore, I needed to keep the sample at 20. This meant that my results were pretty scattered as I did not have enough results. Due to this, I found it much harder to draw concrete conclusions as I did not have enough results.
However, despite not having an ideal number of results, I still felt that my conclusions were quite accurate. For example, all of my hypotheses were true such as the main one which was that the sphere of influence would increase as the size increased. This was shown by how the distances people were prepared to travel to each shop increased as the sizes of the shops increased. It was very important to prove my hypothesis true as it was backed up by a strong argument which meant that my results were very strong.
On the other hand, I realised that although my results backed up my hypotheses, they were defiantly not perfect. For example, ideally a sphere of influence diagram should be a perfect circle bit my ones were not rounded. For example, for one of the shops the sphere of influence was the same radius (i.e. distance between the shop and where the customer lived) towards the north of the shop, but at the south hardly any people came to the shop. There could have been many reasons for this.
Firstly, in the places from where less people came from, there could be another, better shopping centre, where people who live there prefer to go to that one instead. Also, there could be bad road networks in the area which would mean that it would be harder for people who live there to go to the shopping centre. Or quite simply, it might not be a built up area, which would mean that not many people live there, so there would obviously be less people visiting the shops from that area.
If I could plan a further study, I would increase the sample size. This would mean that I would have more results to use to make a better and more reliable conclusion.
