Researching Target Markets

International Market Research

Week 4 - Introduction

Market research is any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy. The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets. ( Wikipedia )

Marketing research [...] is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. ( Wikipedia )

Week 5

In sociology, quantitative research refers to the systematic empirical investigation of social phenomena via statistical, mathematical or numerical data or computational techniques. ( Wikipedia )

Qualitative research is a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research and further contexts. Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often used than large samples. ( Wikipedia )

Week 6

A field of applied statistics, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and the associated survey data collection techniques, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. ( Wikipedia )

Statistical Methods

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. It deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments ( Wikipedia )

Calculus is the mathematical study of change in the same way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of operations and their application to solving equations.

It has two major branches, differential calculus (concerning rates of change and slopes of curves), and integral calculus (concerning accumulation of quantities and the areas under curves); these two branches are related to each other by the fundamental theorem of calculus. ( Wikipedia )

A time series is a sequence of data points, measured typically at successive points in time spaced at uniform time intervals. ( Wikipedia ) An example are the closing values over time of stock market index ( jubo-jubo )

Week 4 - Introduction

• Population
• Census
• Unit (sampling unit)
• Sample and Sampling
• Variable
• Data matrix

One row for one unit

One column for each variable

There are different levels of measurement

• Nominal scale
• Ordinal scale
• Interval scale
• Ratio scale

• The mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data. ( Wikipedia )

Week 6

In statistics and probability theory, the median is the numerical value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. ( Wikipedia )

In descriptive statistics, the quartiles of a ranked set of data values are the three points that divide the data set into four equal groups, each group comprising a quarter of the data. ( Wikipedia )

In arithmetic, the range of a set of data is the difference between the largest and smallest values. ( Wikipedia )

A Likert scale is a psychometric scale commonly involved in research that employs questionnaires. It is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research, such that the term is often used interchangeably with rating scale, or more accurately the Likert-type scale, even though the two are not synonymous. The scale is named after its inventor, psychologist Rensis Likert. ( Wikipedia )

In statistics and w:probability theory, the standard deviation (represented by the Greek letter sigma, σ) shows how much variation or dispersion from the average exists. ( Wikipedia )