Question

Discuss the reasons for the frequent use of cross-tabulations in market research. What are some of the limitations? Give two examples of cross-tabulations you might expect to find in a market research study.

Answer 1

Introduction:

• Cross tabulation is usually performed on categorical data — data that can be divided into mutually exclusive groups.
• Cross tabulations are used to examine relationships within data that may not be readily apparent. Cross tabulation is especially useful for studying market research or survey responses. Cross tabulation of categorical data can be done with through tools such as SPSS, SAS, and Microsoft Excel.

Advantages:

• Eliminates confusion while interpreting data: Raw data can be difficult to interpret. Even for small data sets, it is all too easy to derive wrong results by just looking at the data. Cross tabulation offers a simple method of grouping variables, which minimizes the potential for confusion or error by providing clear results.

• Offers data points to chart out a course of action: Cross tabulation makes it easier to interpret data, which is beneficial for researchers who have limited knowledge of statistical analysis. The clarity offered by cross tabulation helps professionals evaluate their current work and chart out future strategies.

• Helps in deriving innumerable insights: Cross tabulation can help us derive great insights from raw data. These insights are not easy to see when the raw data is formatted as a table. Since cross tabulation clearly maps out relations between categorical variables, researchers can gain better and deeper insights — insights that otherwise would have been overlooked or would have taken a lot of time to decode from more complicated forms of statistical analysis.

Disadvantages / Limitations:

• The first limitation is that the original grouping report has a lot of data on it that isn’t shown on the cross-tab. For example, the cross-tab report doesn’t show the fields for Employee ID or the Shipping Date. In fact, it doesn’t have any detail records shown. This is because cross-tabs can only show summary calculations.
• The second limitation is that you can only print numbers in the summary fields. No text values are allowed. This is because each cell must calculate a summary function and summary functions can only return numbers. If you attempt to put a text field in the cell, the report defaults to printing a count of the text fields.

Examples:

• HR Directors and Managers: Conducting employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and exit interview surveys, can identify problem areas in specific departments or job roles. Along the same line, managers can send surveys to customers to gauge customer satisfaction, and make improvements by department or region as needed.

• School Administrations: When sending course and instructor evaluation surveys to students, administrators will often cross tabulate results with class subjects, the time of the class, and other metadata to discover weakness in curriculum to improve the education experience for students.

• Market and Product Researchers: Conducting any type of satisfaction or feedback survey can be cross tabulated with metadata / demographics as shown in the prior interactive example. The results provide clean actionable data used to improve products and guide the focus of marketing campaigns.

Conclusion:

Given the benefits and drawbacks of cross-tab reports, you have to consider your alternatives before using the cross-tab report. The standard grouping report is easy to create and it is great for showing as much information as necessary. You also have complete control over the formatting. But the data could span many pages and this makes it harder to analyse.

Hope this helps!