Methods

Before releasing our survey and beginning our study, we first held a pilot study. This pilot study occurred on October 3, 2013 in DePaul's Student Center room 364 during class time of the course Multimedia and the World Wide Web. The survey was created through Google Drive and then the link was emailed to the class. Ten students and the Professor, Sal Barry, participated in the pilot. While taking the pilot survey, some participants offered feedback to help us improve and finalize our survey. Suggestions included offering transgender as an option on the demographic question asking if users were male or female and offering checkboxes as opposed to radio buttons on some questions in order to facilitate more than one answer. These suggestions were all taken. Another suggestion was to improve the series of questions asking users to rank which factors (type of food, delivery fee, delivery minimum, online rating, and coupons or discount) are most important to their decision to order food. Unfortunately, due to limitations in Google's survey offerings, we were unable to improve this without jeopardizing the survey's ability to accurately test the hypothesis.

Our final study was conducted from October 28th through October 30th. It used convenience sampling to obtain answers. The three researchers posted a link to the Google survey on their Facebook pages with a note asking for DePaul students who have used an online delivery service at least once to please complete the survey. Friends of the researchers who see the posts choose to participate in the study or ignore the post. The survey asked a total of 20 questions: three were open ended and the rest were multiple choice. When respondents finished with the survey their responses were anonymously linked to a private Google spreadsheet.

Several precautions were taken to ensure that the respondent's rights are protected. First, participation was completely voluntary. Participants were given no incentive for taking the survey and those who chose not to participate were not penalized in any way. To ensure that participants were fully aware of the study they are consenting to, a prewritten disclosure paragraph was placed at the top of the survey. This paragraph included information on the study, researchers, and the contact information of the class's professor and DePaul's Director of Research Protection. In addition, to ensure that all responses were fully anonymous, the survey form was edited to not track the respondents' names, IP addresses, or any other identifying information.