Jonathan KadetMultimedia & the World Wide WebSpring 2013 |
Home / Executive Summary / Introduction / Background / Hypothesis / Questions / Method / Limitations / References / Results / External Data / Discussion / Conclusion |
| We conducted a study on DePaul students about their habits regarding online shopping. Many young people shop online regularly. If executed well, e-commerce, or selling something online, can make businesses thrive. We hypothesized that DePaul students always buy books online and our results, for the most part, supported our hypothesis. 11/23 participants buy books online the most. Almost 50% of them always buy books online. 1/3 (6/18 participants) rarely buy books in the actual stores. 8/13 participants buy books online once a month. The infrequency may be because they buy clothes more often, but need to buy books online because of the schedule of classes. In our freeform questions, a few participants said that they always buy textbooks online because it is cheaper and more convenient. This hypothesis is upheld because participants showed that they buy books online. Buying used books on amazon, or renting them on Chegg, is an easy way to get the books you need for a fraction of the price. Our second hypothesis was that DePaul students shop for clothing online more regularly than for other items. Our results came back positive. 13/23 participants shop for clothing online the most more than anything else. Not 1 participant said that they rarely buy clothes in the actual store. A few participants said they shop online for clothes a few times a month contrary to only buying books once a month or never. Our free-form questions revealed that many people are turned off from buying clothes online because they want to try it on and make sure it fits correctly. Our final hypothesis was that female DePaul students do more online shopping than male DePaul students overall. Our results came back null. 8 males took our survey, and 15 females took our survey. Out of the males and females, the most common response for how often they shopped online was once a month. Only 1 male and female shopped online everyday. Our data is not sufficient enough to conclude whether our hypothesis was supported or not. We asked the appropriate questions to try and get the best data to support our hypotheses. Our pilot test used convenience sampling consisting of at least 10 of our closest friends who currently attend DePaul University. We modified the questions according to how the pilot subjects reacted to them. Our only limitation, at first, was that we had a modified scope of only DePaul students, so the data could not easily be translated for the entire population. We executed our survey at three different times to try and incorporate more variations of students. Our supporting data was found mainly using online libraries such as JSTOR. |