Research methods in Aviation

Assignment Instructions

This assignment is a test of your ability to design and construct a basic questionnaire to measure a meaningful aviation construct and write-up how you did so in a style consistent with a proper aviation or management journal article. This assignment will be marked out of 100 and will account for 40% of the overall marks for this paper. Make sure you read through this assignment and fully understand what is required of you.

Assignment background/rationale

At some time in your careers in aviation management, you may want to construct and administer a questionnaire and report on your findings afterwards. For example, you may want to gain feedback from the passengers who fly with your airline about their overall experience of flying to investigate if there is a different pattern of responses according to age, gender, destination, or some other factor, such as before and after some improvements to the service. Learning how to design and use a questionnaire is probably the most useful skill to take away from this paper.

Objective of this assignment
Assume that you have graduated and now work in management at an airport. Your task is to design an ‘original’ questionnaire that can be used to measure the ‘level of satisfaction’ of passengers who arrive and/or depart from you airport. (You do not need to survey transfer passengers)

You should assume that you want to measure as much of the experience of your airport as you possibly can (although the final questionnaire should have no more than about 30 questions, excluding those used to ascertain demographic information).
Outcome
You must write-up this assignment in a style consistent with that suitable for publication in an academic journal (e.g., Journal of Air Transport Management) . You should therefore begin with an ‘introduction’ section, in which you outline why ‘level of satisfaction’ with an airport is an important consideration for the economic viability of the airline for which you work. This introduction should be around 650-750 words. It will require proper academic references (at least 6). Up to 15% of the marks for this assignment will be awarded for the introduction, so you should ensure that it provides a viable and well-written justification for why you would want to do this study. You are not required to write an abstract.

Next, you require a method section. Here, just like a real journal article would have, you should have participants, materials, and procedure sub-headings. In the appropriate sections, your write-up should include an explanation of how you would ‘operationalise’ the concept of ‘satisfaction’ in the context of airport users, which should explain why you considered the specific areas that you considered (e.g., quality of meals) and why you chose the response format that you did. Also explain how you would administrate your questionnaire (i.e., how you would get people to fill out your questionnaire) and how you would select who would be participants.

Questionnaires are used for a purpose, so you must also explain in detail how you would analyse the completed questionnaires you would collect. This will probably be best in the ‘materials’ sub-heading of the method section. For example, when asked to select a response option to a series of statements such as ‘This airport has really good shops’, if a person answers ‘strongly agree’ to 7 questions, ‘neither agree nor disagree’ to 4 questions, and ‘slightly disagree’ to 9 questions, you must clearly explain how this information would be interpreted to give you, the researcher, an overall ‘satisfaction’ rating for that particular passenger? The overall method section is worth 50% of the marks for this assignment.

Three questionnaires must have been filled out by three different people who have been customers of an airport. (So consider this when deciding on which airport your questionnaire refers to. I would guess for many of you Auckland Airport would be the best one to investigate.) They must include appropriate instructions for the person to understand what is required.

You will require a short results section. Here you report the descriptive statistics for your three passengers. Also in the results section, you should describe:

i) What statistical test would you use to explore if there is a difference in the mean overall ratings of male and female passengers (assuming you had 100 rather than 3 participants?

ii) What statistical test could you use to test if there is a relationship between age of participant and their overall satisfaction rating?

Finally, write a discussion section. In this section, you should also speculate on any potential limitations to the study you have conducted.

The questionnaire that you have designed must be added after the reference list, as an appendix. Questionnaires that look good and professional will receive extra bonus marks

Good presentation of the questionnaire, appropriate wording, correct APA style referencing, and effort will gain you up to 15% of the marks for this assignment.

For the whole assignment, I would expect a word length of approximately 2500 -4000 words (not including references).
General tips
Your ‘article’ must be written clearly and simply. Try to emulate what you will have observed to be a [social] scientific or management style in proper academic journals. So try not to write long unwieldy sentences or use big unnecessary words. A plain, easy to read style is what will communicate your knowledge the best. You would be very wise indeed to read a few journal articles which report the development of a questionnaire.