Palmerston Road – Wednesday. Palmerston Road – Thursday.
Frequency of Visit (gained from Questionnaires)
Commercial Road – Wednesday.
Gunwharf – Wednesday.
Palmerston road – Wednesday.
Analysis:
The results show that generally the majority of shoppers live within 5 miles away from the shopping centres; this is especially true for Palmerston Road. Shoppers who live further away tend to go to Commercial Road and even more so Gunwharf. However those numbers are not particularly high (around 10%) and so the first Hypothesis – ‘More people travel from further away to visit Gunwharf than they do to visit Palmerston or Commercial Road’ Can be rejected.
The results also show that most people visit Palmerston Road and Commercial Road quite frequently (once a week or less), whereas they visit Gunwharf more occasionally (around 45% less people visit Gunwharf frequently than Palmerston Road). And so my Hypothesis 2 - ‘People travel more frequently to Commercial or Palmerston Road than to Gunwhalf’ is accepted.
Conclusion:
The first Hypothesis has not really been proved correct or wrong, however the second hypothesis is quite valid. However I thought my results would have been higher in favour of my hypothesis. For example there would be a higher percentage for First time visit to Gunwharf, or there would be a higher percentage of people who travel further to get to Gunwharf than Palmerston or Commercial Road. As we know Gunwharf is not just a shopping area, it boasts many features and events like exclusive restaurants, residential, leisure activities so it is quite clear why people form further a field come and visit Gunwharf, and this is maybe why Gunwharf came highest in the ‘first visit’ sector as it is more of something to visit as it were. Where as Commercial and Palmerston Road are more pure shopping areas, especially Palmerston road which is much more of a local shopping destination as it provides few shops, this is clarified in our results as Palmerston Road came highest under the ‘everyday visit’.
Evaluation:
It was a very cold day and this meant that mistakes could easily be made. Firstly human error, as it’s cold one could make printing mistakes. Also going for most convenient people, i.e the closest or the ones who looked the most approachable. Furthermore the people could be very cold at the time of asking them, and so hurry the questionnaires not giving accurate answers. In addition to it being cold, the questionnaires that were provided were very general. The questions that had to be asked were not really thought out, and there could have been better ones that would help us more on our investigation. Also we only did it on 2 days, which were, to add, both weekdays. I would think it would be much busier on weekdays and so therefore we would get a much better idea for our investigation. Another operator or human error could easily made, especially when tabulating the results, or doing percentages, when the work is very repetitive; mistakes are regularly made.
