Results
Demographic Information:
For our study, we were able to gather 94 respondents in our survey. Of those 94 participants, 28 identified as freshmen (29.8%), 6 identified as sophomores (6.4%), 33 were juniors (35.1%), 21 were seniors (22.3%), 3 were fifth+ years (3.2%), and 3 identified as graduate students (3.2%).
As for the gender breakdown of our participants, there were 22 males (23.4%) and 72 females (76.6%).
Hypotheses-Related Results:
1.
H1: DePaul students are more likely to buy or rent textbooks from online retailers than buy or rent from the campus bookstore.
H0: DePaul students are less likely to buy or rent textbooks from online retailers than buy or rent from the campus bookstore.
Out of the 94 participants, 84 stated that they either bought or rented their textbooks. Of these 84, 64 choose to buy or rent their textbooks online while only 20 participants chose to buy or rent theirs from the bookstore. This result (as seen in the graph) supports our first hypothesis.
2.
H1: DePaul students decide to buy or rent textbooks online over the campus bookstore because of the price differences.
H0: DePaul students do not decide to buy or rent textbooks online over the campus bookstore because of the price differences.
Of the 94 participants, 84 stated that they either bought or rented their textbooks. Of the 84 participants, 64 bought or rented online while 20 of them bought or rented from the campus bookstore. Within each group, 60 out of 64 participants who bought or rented online said they were motivated to do so because of the prices. For those 20 who bought or rented from the campus bookstore, only 8 were motivated by the price of the books. These results support our projected hypothesis in that the students are motivated by the prices presented online over the bookstore.
3.
H1: Lowerclassmen will be more likely to buy or rent textbooks from the campus bookstore than upperclassmen.
H0: Lowerclassmen will not be less likely to buy or rent textbooks from the campus bookstore than upperclassmen.
Of the 94 participants, 34 were grouped into the 'lowerclassmen' category if they identified as freshmen or sophomores. The remaining 60 were placed into the 'upperclassmen' category if they identified as being a third year/junior or above. As seen in the table, more upperclassmen (13) chose to buy/or rent from the bookstore than lowerclassmen (7). These numerical results support our null hypothesis, however, when the statistics were turned into percentages, 21.6% of upperclassmen bought or rented from the bookstore while 20.6% of lowerclassmen bought or rented form the bookstore. This is only a 1% difference, therefore is probably not significant enough to say there is a large difference in relation between class rank and buying or renting from the bookstore.
These two pie charts below show the similarity of portions between upperclassmen and lowerclassmen who bought or rented their textbooks from the bookstore.
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4.
H1: DePaul students are overall more likely to rent their textbooks.
H0: DePaul student are overall less likely to rent their textbooks.
Out of the 94 participants, 84 stated that they either bought or rented their textbooks. Of these 84, 59 choose to buy their textbooks while only 25 participants preferred to rent theirs . This result (as seen in the graph) does not support our fourth hypothesis. DePaul students clearly like to buy their textbooks.
Other Results:
We found it interesting and important to note the amount of textbook a typical student needed per quarter. As seen in the graph, our results showed that the majority (50%) of our participants needed 4-6 textbooks per quarter. Thirty seven participants (39.4%) reported needing 1-3 textbooks per quarter. No participants indicated needing more than 11 books per quarter. With such a prominent number of books needed, we felt it would be beneficial to include this data to make sense of how DePaul students typically obtained their textbooks.
Click here for a PDF of the survey results
Click here for a PDF of the survey free response results