Study Purpose This research analyzes university students’ spending patterns, when they go out to party. This information might be important for university administrations, businesses, and parents. It might also serve as an indication of how serious they take their studies. Finally, it gives us some measurement on how much money students have at their disposal and how they spend it (or at least part of it).
Hypotheses:
H(1): Guys spend more money than girls.
It is highly possible that guys like the bar scene more than girls do. For one, they go there to watch sports events such as soccer games. Additionally, they like to hang out there with friends while having some pints.
H(2): The more advanced students are in their university career, the less money and time they spend going out.
More advanced classes are supposedly getting more difficult than first or second year classes. This would imply that students must spend more time studying and would therefore have less time to go out. This, in turn, would entail that they are unlikely to spend money for partying purposes.
H(3): The more time students spend studying, the less money they spend going out.
The rationale for this hypothesis is that students that study long hours just do not have the time to go out a lot and hence are unlikely to spend a lot of money.
H(4): The more students think they need alcohol to have fun, the more they will spend going out.
Alcohol is expensive, and the more students drink while going out, the more money they will spend at bars and nightclubs.
H(5): The more students think that their university offers them good free time activities, the less money they will spend while going out.
If students spend a lot of their free time participating in university sponsored sports or social clubs, they will not have the time to go to bars or nightclubs frequently. As a result, they will not spend significant amounts of money while going out.
H(6): People that pay their tuition in full or partly will not spend as much money at bars than people that have their tuition paid.
The rationale for this hypothesis is straightforward: students that must pay a significant amount of their tuition do not have a lot of money left to spend at bars and nightclubs.
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Further Reading
Nuts and Bolts of Survey Research
Nardi, P. M. (2018).Doing survey research: A guide to quantitative methods. London: Routledge (Chap. 1; Chap. 4). Chapter 1 of this book provides a nice introduction why we do survey research, why it is important, and what important insights it can bring to the social sciences.
Chapter 4 gives a nice introduction into questionnaire developments and the different steps that go into the construction of a survey.
Constructing a Survey
Krosnick, J. A. (2018). Questionnaire design. In The Palgrave handbook of survey research (pp. 439–455). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Short and comprehensive summary of the dominant literature into questionnaire design. Good as afirst read of the topic.
Saris, W. E., & Gallhofer, I. N. (2014). Design, evaluation, and analysis of questionnaires for survey research. San Francisco: Wiley. A very comprehensive guide into the design of surveys. Among others, the book thoroughly discusses how concepts become questions, how we can come up with response categories for the questions we use, and how to structure questions.
Applied Texts: Question Wording
Lundmark, S., Gilljam, M., & Dahlberg, S. (2015). Measuring generalized trust: An examination of question wording and the number of scale points. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(1), 26–43. The authors show that the question wording of the general questions about trust in other individuals (i.e. generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted?) matters in getting accurate responses.
Conducting a Survey 5
Abstract
When the questionnaire is in itsfinal form, the researcher needs to determine what the sample and what the population of her study is. This chapterfirst explains both terms and further distinguishes between random, representative, and biased samples. Second, it discusses several sampling techniques such as quota sampling and snowball sampling. Third, it introduces different types of surveys (e.g., face- to-face surveys, telephone surveys, and mail-in or Internet surveys) the author of a survey can use to distribute it. As a practical component, students test their surveys in an empirical setting by soliciting answers from peers. While this procedure does not allow students to get representative or random samples, it nevertheless offers students the possibility to collect their own data, which they can analyze later. At the end of the unit, students are taught how to input their responses into an SPSS or Stata dataset.