Marketing Research with SPSS

This part of the Marketing Research course will apply a hands-on approach, providing a step-by-step treatment of the major choices facing marketing researchers and managers when using SPSS in practice. The lab will not only be useful for future marketing researchers who will be faced with using SPSS and other similar statistical software packages in their daily practice. Even more importantly, the knowledge and skills gained will be useful for all those future marketing managers commissioning and using results of marketing research reports to make marketing-related decisions. Lack of knowledge about how proper statistical procedures should be used and interpreted among marketing managers often results in statistics being left out or only superficially covered in marketing research reports, so as not to scare off the reader. This, of course, invariably, means that the marketing manager is no longer capable of judging for him/herself whether the correct procedures have been used or implemented properly and whether the results, indeed, show what the report claims they do. This lab will enable future marketing practitioners, as well as researchers (be it in practice (e.g. those employed in marketing research agencies), or in the academia (e.g. those continuing their education through PhD programs)) to conduct, understand, and, most importantly, correctly interpret appropriate statistical procedures used in marketing research.

The lab lessons will build upon the theoretical and practical knowledge learned in the Marketing Research course. Specifically, students’ knowledge of research design, survey construction, and measurement level (i.e. variable types: nominal, ordinal, interval) will be crucial for understanding and making optimal use of the techniques discussed in the lab.

By the end of the lab, students who have no previous experience using SPSS will be able to analyse survey data using SPSS and interpret their findings. While statistics will not be taught from scratch, the main statistical tools used for survey data analysis will be reviewed and discussed. Students will be conducting analysis using SPSS on computers. Using real data sets from marketing research studies, students will learn how to:
· prepare a data set in SPSS,
· identify which types of analyses are appropriate for different types of data,
· analyse the reliability of multi-item scales (Cronbach’s alpha),
· produce basic frequency distributions and descriptive statistics,
· produce cross-tabulations,
· test whether two proportions are different (z-test),
· test whether two means are different (t-test),
· test if three or more means are different (ANOVA),
· understand the cause-and-effect relationship between one dependent variable and several independent variables (linear regression),
· conduct cluster analysis,
· read and interpret SPSS output,
· build SEM models (optional - if time permits)

Course leader

Dr. Ivana Bušljeta Banks earned her Doctoral degree at the Marketing Department, Faculty of Applied Economics of the University of Antwerp. After returning to Croatia, she joined ZSEM as a Senior Lecturer of the Business Communications in English.

Target group

This course is recomended for final year(s) undergraduate students, master and MBA students

Course aim

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