Discussion

As a whole, the results from our survey were very much along the lines of what we expected. With three hypotheses to prove, two of them were supported. Looking back at the collection of data, the demographics of our respondents was also very positive. We collected data from a variety of DePaul students. We are not sure if the data would be the same if we had a larger pool of respondents though. With only three percent of the respondents being freshman, we have identified this as a limitation to our study and perhaps our conclusion to our second hypothesis would have been different had we had all years in school been equally represented.

Below we look at each hypotheses in more detail and share some discussion topics:

H1: DePaul students are more likely to order food during the week than on the weekend.
H0: DePaul students are more likely to order food on the weekend than during the week.

We found that this hypothesis was supported. With 60% ordering predominantly on the weekend, 25% ordering on weekdays, 12% ordering equally on both and 3% with no preference. Keep in mind we had the weekend defined as a "DePaul weekend". DePaul weekends include Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If we had made it a regular weekend we may have come to a different conclusion.

Another thought for discussion might be, if we had given participants only two options to choose from, the choice of ordering on weekends or weekdays, it is possible there would have been wider margins in our results. But because we included the option for participants to include their own answer, our statistics were close in comparison and did not give as definitive results as we would have liked.

H2: DePaul students with a meal plan are less likely to order food online than students without a meal plan.
H0: DePaul students with a meal plan are not less likely to order food online than students without a meal plan.

We found this hypothesis was supported. When first observing the data one will find that most of the respondents with a meal plan who said they ordered food online one to three times a month was actually greater than the majority of respondents who also ordered food online one to three times a month. Yet, to prove our hypotheses, no respondent with a meal plan ordered more than three times a month.

This hypothesis was made based off of the idea that people using meal plans would not have the need to spend money on outside vendors. Yet, as we stated above, only a minimal percentage of respondents actually had a meal plan. Also, only a small amount of respondents were freshmen. DePaul freshman are required to have a meal plan. In knowing this, if we had more freshman respondents would this statistic be different?

H3: DePaul students are more likely to base their food ordering decision on the cost of the food and delivery than any other factor.
H0: DePaul students are more likely to base their food ordering decision on factors other than the cost of the food and delivery.

We found our null hypothesis was supported. Contradictory to our assumption, DePaul students are actually more likely to base their food ordering decision on the type of food not the cost of food and delivery. So we can see that DePaul students priorities, when ordering food, according to this data are not price related. This can bring us to question whether or not DePaul student's food budget is their own, or provided by their parents. Would this make a significant difference in their choice to order food online?