Post on 15-May-2017
Assignment Three
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LIS3201 – Research & Data Analysis
Dr. Chris Landbeck
The Forgotten of the Second Floor (Group 5)
26 April 2013
Survey Plan
a. General Survey Plan
Parking at Florida State University can be a touchy subject with students. The refrain is
often heard, “I hate parking!” Spots, it seems, are increasingly tough to find, while more students
pile into brand-new on-campus dorms. Students hate parking—or so it seems. Aside from the
most vocal of students, it is hard to know if there is actually widespread distaste for the parking
system. We hope to discover exactly what the attitudes, beliefs, and characteristics of student
parkers at Florida State are as part of a larger research effort into the efficiency and usability of
parking at Florida State.
In order to learn more about student parkers at Florida State, our research team will
deploy a tested and approved survey to the general population. This survey will measure how
students feel about various aspects of parking, as well as their experiences using the system.
This survey will help the team get a better understanding of whether student parkers really
believe there is a problem, and, if so, what they’d like to see done about it.
The survey will be implemented in two formats: it will be hosted online (we believe this
will be the primary way for most students to complete the survey), and, in order to increase
response rate and awareness, will also be handed out by student workers on campus. Both
implementations will offer a reward upon survey completion of five dollars. These two methods
combined will hopefully yield the results the team needs in order to gather statistically relevant
(and insightful) data to work with.
The online implementation of the survey will be hosted using Qualtrics software on
Blackboard. Students will be given the link, asked to complete the survey, and the results will be
stored with Qualtrics. Once they have completed the survey, an end of survey element will be
added which will take them to an outside page that we maintain; this web page will generate a
random, unique code for the respondent. This code will then be stored in our database, and the
page with the code will direct the respondent to either claim their reward the next time they are
on campus (at one of our survey distribution locations), or, if that is not possible, to call a local
Florida State number or email to have us mail this reward to the respondent. The number and
email address will lead to our office techs, which will be explained further on in this report.
In order to dissuade students from completing the survey multiple times, once the
student claims the reward, the unique code will be removed from our database, and the
student’s name and FSUID entered into the system. Before responding to any reward claim, it
will first be checked that the unique code exists within the database, and the student’s name
and FSUID does not. This will help deter repeaters, but will not jeopardize anonymity; although
the name and FSUID will be stored in our system, the deletion of the unique code ensures that
there will be nothing linking the student to a particular response.
The online implementation will hopefully be the main implementation of the survey; it will
be easy to collect and analyze the results using Qualtrics, and as Qualtrics is integrated with
Blackboard, students may have encountered it before, making it an ideal choice for the task. In
order to prevent catastrophic loss of data for this implementation, the survey results will be
downloaded and backed up onto a local storage device weekly; in the event that response rates
are astronomical, this backup rate will be increased as necessary. The goal of this backup plan
is to prevent unnecessary loss of data while not affecting the ability to respond to the survey; as
a result, the time chosen for this backup will be a time when the fewest students are responding,
as indicated by the first hundred (or several hundred) responses.
Should a student be unable to claim their reward, they will be able to contact students
located at an office on-campus for additional help. These office techs will be students working
part-time for minimum wage, and they will work with the database, manage mailing rewards out,
and enter surveys completed on paper into the system. They will not have to handle the
technical side of the survey; they will not complete the backups (the research team will), and
they will not handle the server hosting our database (an outside team will be retained to do this).
These techs will have access to the database to delete codes and enter names. Even should
catastrophic data erasure happen at the hands of a tech, nothing exceedingly critical will be
deleted, as our backups will be stored locally. The techs will not have access to destroy
anything of great value.
The techs will be students hired from the general population; they will work within the
office space we secure on campus. They will work for three-hour shifts, working Monday
through Saturday 8am to 8pm. Before 5pm, there will be four techs on site to handle the brunt of
the paper surveys, mailing, and calls/emails, and after 5pm there will only be two to finish out
the night.
The online portion of the survey will be advertised (in conjunction with the paper portion)
through various methods; these include emails, flyers, and our on-campus representatives.
Flyers will contain shortened links to the Qualtrics survey that can be torn off and kept for later
reference; emails will contain a link. On-campus representatives will spread information through
word of mouth and small strips of paper with the shortened link. An example flyer and email will
be submitted in conjunction with this plan.
The online portion of the survey will begin the first week of school; however, the first
week’s data will likely be removed as garbage, as the team will use that week to work out the
bugs within the system, determine the response rate, and identify popular times of day for the
responses. The office techs will begin working around the same time; they will be trained in
Qualtrics, and will be able to provide basic technical support. Should anything go
catastrophically wrong, the office techs will pass the calls on to the research team, who will
constantly oversee the first week. Any system errors, large or small, will be handled on a case-
by-case basis. After the first week, the techs will continue acting as basic tech support, but there
should be no consistent or large errors to handle.
The survey (in both implementations) will end the week before finals week; finals week is
a world unto itself, and as schedules are vastly different, the data would be vastly inconsistent.
Therefore, finals week will begin the next phase of the project—collection and analysis. Workers
will no longer work after the week before finals week.
In addition to the online implementation of the survey, there will be a paper
implementation across campus; on-campus representatives will be hired to handle this. They
will be posted in high-traffic areas, including in front of the library, in front of the union, in the
union, and in front of the bookstore. These on-campus representatives will be split into groups:
two will sit at a table, and up to four will walk around directing students to the table (or recruiting
them for the online version with the slips of paper). The representatives at the table will hand out
surveys for completion, gather completed surveys, and check for duplicate completions. They
will also manage the money for rewards, using a locked money box at the table.
The representatives at the table will check for duplicates using a specially-created
Android app running on supplied Android tablets; these tablets will be connected to the internet,
and the app will check for the student’s name and FSUID in the database. Should the survey
taker show up as having already completed the survey, the representative will refuse the
student a survey, and will politely thank them for their interest. Any incidents will be handled on
a case-by-case basis, with police intervention being a last resort but an option.
The money box contained on the table will contain five dollar bills; this money, in addition
to the money managed by the office techs, will be counted at the beginning and end of each
day, and in order to track and manage theft, serial numbers of all the five dollar bills will be
recorded (by the research team) before the survey begins. Any thefts that occur will be handled
with the appropriate authorities.
The on-campus representatives will be students paid minimum wage to work in shifts of
six people for three hour shifts. The tables will operate from 9am to 6pm, Monday through
Friday, at their designated locations. There will be three tables set up; one in the union, one in
front of the bookstore, and one near the entrance to the library. Permission will be required from
each of these locations (and/or maintenance) to set up tables in these locations. Reservations
may be required for Market Wednesdays.
In addition to the tables, two to four representatives will be dispatched to walk around and
approach students; there will be two in front of the library, two in the union, two in front of the
union, and two in front of the bookstore. They will hand out slips of paper containing the
shortened URL for the parking survey, and if they are able to engage students, will direct them
to complete the survey either online or at the table. Should students be hostile, cases will be
handled individually, with the representative’s safety considered the highest concern.
The two implementations of the survey, in conjunction with the combined advertising, should
hopefully result in enough data to compile and analyze at the end of the semester. As this will
occur during only one semester, any catastrophic failures will result in re-trying the survey a
different semester. The survey will require some specific permissions to function; these
permissions include, but are not limited to: the President and any related administrators, for
high-level knowledge and approval of the research; Transportation Services and any related
administrators or entities, for immediate approval and knowledge of the research, as well as
promotion; the Union, the bookstore, and the library, for permission to place and operate tables;
the Provost, for knowledge and approval of the research; the Research Ethics body on campus,
for scrutiny and approval of the survey and all other research methods; the legal team, for
preparation in case of any legal allegations; academic spacing, and/or any related/necessary
entity or administrator for office space allocation and telephone line approval; and Information
Services, for access for the tablets, telecommunications and hardware for the offices, and
approval of the use of Qualtrics for this particular purpose.
Overall, the research team hopes to come out of this exercise with a deeper understanding of
student attitudes, beliefs, and feelings towards parking at Florida State; it will provide the
research team with statistics to back up their presentations to appropriate administrators, as
well as providing the team with an understanding of what the issues are that are most important
to the students. With this information understood, the team will go on to conduct further
research, and will base suggestions and conclusions at least in part on these results. The
importance of these surveys cannot be overstated.
b. SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Throughout the survey deployment, management, and analysis, the team will rely on certain
strengths that both we and Florida State possess. These strengths will aid us in all aspects of the project,
and will make our jobs much easier. These strengths include:our organizational skills, so that the process
will be smooth, documented, and organized; our ability to think on our feet, which will aid in any and all
situations that arise; our technological literacy, which has aided in designing and developing the survey
plan, and will aid in deploying, maintaining, and supporting the surveys; the resources Florida State
provides, including Qualtrics for the surveys, office space for the office techs, and the technological and
monetary support they will provide; the ability to work with Transportation Services to reach a large
audience and greatly increase our rate of responses; the ability to utilize the foot traffic on campus
through tabling thanks to maintenance and spacing permissions; and the ability of the team to work
together and create a feasible plan, and to coordinate on the deployment and maintenance of the survey.
Weaknesses
However, there are some weaknesses that may hinder or make the survey process more difficult.
These weaknesses are organizational in nature, and can be managed and/or fixed. The most important of
these weaknesses is funding; while Florida State will provide the team with funding for the project, they
may not provide us with enough. In addition, Florida State may not be able to provide us with the office
space or physical resources necessary to complete and maintain the project; while we will apply for these
resources, it is possible that they may be allocated elsewhere. Finally, the team may be faced with
impatient students; while the survey is not terribly long in nature, the students may not have the attention
span or drive to complete it as necessary. With some management, these weaknesses can be reduced or
eliminated.
Opportunities
Fortunately for the team, there are several opportunities presented to us by the student body and
the university; these opportunities were neither planned nor controlled, but will, nonetheless, make the
deployment and maintenance of the survey far easier. These opportunities include: a large population of
students that are on campus during the day, allowing us to reach a much larger population of students for
survey completion; a population that is computer literate, which will allow us to deploy the survey online,
and have student workers who understand the basics of technology; a large population of students in
general, which will make it easy for us to interview and hire student workers for the survey; a student
population motivated by money (which is to say, a student population that will respond positively to
money), which will allow us to both hire necessary workers and get students to complete the survey; and,
finally, Florida State's status as a research institution, which will help us gain access to the necessary tools
to create, deploy, analyze, and understand the result of the surveys. Overall, these opportunities will aid
the research team greatly in the survey process, though they were by no means created by the research
team for this project.
Threats
Unfortunately, there are also some threats to the project that, while impossible to eliminate, can
be managed to a degree. These threats can come from many places and people, and may have a significant
impact on the project. These threats include: a largely apathetic student body which may not be willing to
participate in the survey; pushback from various people and entities (including Parking Services and
administrators) who do not want the current parking system changed for reasons including it being
difficult and expensive to implement; the loss of workers, whether due to workers leaving or us having to
fire them; unrest among the research group, which could grind the project to a halt as we determine the
best course of action; and the inability to hire enough workers, due to the semester-long work and the
demanding positions. These threats cannot be wholly eliminated, but they can be managed with some
work from the team.
c. BOSCARD Report
Background
The research team is conducting these surveys because we would like to find out if there are any
secondary factors that cause inefficiencies in the parking system, and if there are, we would like to
identify what they are. To that end, the research team is conducting large-scale research, which the
surveys are an integral part of. With the surveys, the team hopes to identify the factors that negatively
affect student parking at Florida State, as according to the ones who use it most: the students.
With this research, there are several parties that will benefit; the first and most important is the
students. By discovering what the students feel are the biggest problems with the system, the team can
make student-centric recommendations to the university. The university itself will also benefit; with the
research conducted here (and throughout the larger research endeavor), the parking system can be
scrutinized and made more efficient, resulting in fewer problems, a better system, and happier students.
Furthermore, the university will gain if it makes any changes or updates to the parking system in the
future; by having the cache of knowledge to draw from, the administrators will have a guide for where
and how to build new parking lots and/or structures. And finally, in a more immediate sense, any future
research will benefit from these surveys; by identifying key problems and attitudes now, future research
will be more directed, and will have a more meaningful contribution to the subject as a whole.
Objectives
Our objectives for this project are multifaceted. First, we seek to identify any potential problems within
the parking system at Florida State; second, we seek to gather information about student attitudes, beliefs,
and behaviors regarding parking at Florida State; third, we seek to understand characteristics about
student parkers at Florida State; fifth, we seek to gather meaningful statistics about parking at Florida
State; and finally, we seek to discover trends about attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors when it comes to
student parkers at Florida State.
Scope
The research we are conducting is split into various directions; these surveys are aimed entirely at
student parking on the main Florida State campus. As a result, anyone who parks in student parking is
considered part of the population; it does not follow, however, that the population includes all students.
The scope for this research also does not include faculty parking, visitor parking, or any other kind of
parking on campus; it furthermore does not include students parking in faculty lots. It finally does not
include any other parking off campus, around Tallahassee, or anywhere else in the world.
Constraints
As this project progresses, it will be constrained by various factors outside of the team’s control.
These constraints cannot be removed, and must be considered as part of the project’s error. There are two
main constraints specific to these surveys; they are: that the population is reduced due to some students
not having cars (or parking on campus), and that because some students only park on campus at specific
times of day (really early in the morning, for example, or only at noon), their responses will not be
broadly applicable, but rather, only truly relevant for the time during which they park. These constraints
are joined by constraints that plague all survey projects; these include that not everyone in the population
will respond, and that the most vocal will be the most likely to respond, leaving the results possibly
skewed towards those with the strongest feelings. These are true of all surveys, and have been taken into
consideration when designing the survey plan.
Assumptions
Throughout this project, we make a variety of assumptions; as these affect what we choose to do
and how we choose to do it, they are important to note. For starters, we assume that we will be able to get
enough responses to be statistically relevant; we also assume that our survey instrument is free from bias
(it has been tested), and is as accurate as possible (questions are worded the most efficiently, etc.). We
also assume that our respondents will not lie or be untruthful in any way. We furthermore assume that the
majority of students on campus drive a vehicle (or at least park one somewhere), and that if there are
other groups of people who park in student parking, they are so much in the minority that their responses
can be disregarded. Finally, and most importantly, we make one large assumption throughout all of our
research on this topic: there are not enough parking spots on campus (that is to say, there most certainly
are inefficiencies in the system). It is important to keep these assumptions in mind when evaluating our
plans and our research, as they are the basis for a great deal of our decisions.
Risks
Like almost anything in life, there are certain risks with taking on a project of this magnitude.
There are some general risks, including that there will be a catastrophic natural disaster (or something
similar) that will greatly affect the Florida State main campus; this will shut down our research, but will
be far out of anyone’s control. There are also risks more specific to our situation; these include: that the
attitudes, belies, and/or behaviors regarding parking may change throughout the semester we are
surveying the students; that the method of survey deployment may actually hinder the response rate
(people will not like being chased after for some reason); that during certain parts of the semester, we will
simply not get many responses (could be for almost any reason, including that students stop going to class
and therefore stop interacting with our advertising); and that although certain students do have a parking
pass, they may choose other methods of getting to class instead, making them irrelevant to our survey.
These risks cannot be removed entirely; but for each, the team can think on their feet and react; for
example, if response rates slow at a certain part of a semester (and the team suspects slipping class
attendance), an email can be sent out to remind students who do not visit campus that this survey exists.
In addition, if attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviors change greatly over the course of the semester, the team
may have to re-do the surveys, this time at specific parts within the semester. However, if something like
a catastrophic natural disaster occurs, the only true response is simply to scrap the data and try again
much later. Overall, these remain simply risks for the time being—they are not guaranteed to happen.
But, if they should, the team will evaluate the situation and act in a way that is the most appropriate.
Deliverables
This project will produce many deliverables over the course of the semester. The first one is this
plan; the second one, of course, is the actual survey instrument, set up and ready to be deployed. The team
will then produce survey results over the course of the semester; finally, the team will put together a
detailed survey report for presentation to appropriate individuals.
d. AOA Diagram
See attached file.
e. Email and Flyer examples
See attached files.
f. Survey Instrument
This link will take you to the team’s survey, hosted on Qualtrics: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_aboe2FdHfvU2J2l
Interview Plan
a. General Interview Plan
The research team would like to understand parking at Florida State University from the
students’ perspective. In order to do this, the team will conduct a series of interviews with a
variety of students; these interviews will gather more in-depth information on the beliefs and
attitudes of student parkers. The interviews will be collected and analyzed, and relevant quotes
and ideas will be used to guide both future research and future recommendations. The
interviews are very important in getting a full picture of parking at Florida State.
The interviews themselves will take place on campus in office space provided by Florida State.
The interviews will be short, less than an hour, and for successful participation, the students will
be rewarded with ten dollars. Students will collect this reward as they leave the interview itself.
The interviews will be recorded using audio-visual recording software; this choice was not made
lightly, but was made so that the interview could be most accurately reviewed at a later time.
Several team members may watch the interview, though they were not present; this allows the
team to get the fullest level of analysis possible for the interviews. As a result, this method of
recording was deemed to be the best.
The recordings will be stored on local storage, and will be accessible only to the members of the
research team; examinations of the interviews will happen on a weekly basis (including
transcription). The examinations will also be stored on local storage. This local storage will have
backups written biweekly.
The interviewees will be recruited through a combination of methods. These include: the use of
flyers, the use of social media to promote the interviews, an email sent out by Transportation
Services (that the team writes, which is then approved), mailers to students living off-campus,
flyers on car windshields, and chalk advertising. Each of these methods is discussed as
necessary in the following paragraphs.
Flyers will be created by the research team, and a group of student workers (working part-time
and paid minimum wage) will be hired to distribute these flyers; they will go around to approved
bulletin boards during their shifts and will place the flyers as necessary; in addition, they will
then go to assigned parking locations and stick flyers under the windshields. The student
workers will work in teams of two per lot/garage; they will work for three hours (12pm-3pm,
busiest time of day) and will flyer as many cars as possible. If people approach the flyers team,
they will be handled on a case-by-case basis; if students are angry, the workers will be
encouraged to walk away and contact the police as necessary, and if they are curious, they will
explain the research to the students. The safety of the workers is the highest priority.
These flyers will only be distributed on a monthly basis; students will work on one or two lots a
week, making their way around the entire campus over the course of a month. The flyers on the
bulletin boards will be slightly different from the flyers on cars in that the flyers on bulletin boards
will have tear-offs at the bottom containing necessary contact information; the ones on
windshields will simply contain one copy of this information. These flyers will be distributed to as
much as the cars on campus as possible.
In addition to flyers, mailers will be sent out to students on campus every month or two. These
mailers will be put together by our office techs (discussed later in the plan), and will be mailed
out to students with a local address on file. These mailers will be the same fliers that are posted
on the car windshields; a member of the research team will collect the flyers when they are
done and send them through a local post office. These mailers will not be often, however, as
students will be receiving so many other requests to participate.
Three less-intensive forms of recruitment will be an email by Transportation Services, chalk
advertising, and social media advertising. The team will write the copy of an email for
Transportation Services to send out; once approved, it will be sent to the entire student body.
The endorsement from Transportation Services may be important to convince some students
that the interviews are of great importance to the future of parking; as such, the team feels this
email will be a key strategy in getting interviewees. In addition to this email, the team will write
chalk advertisements in various spots around campus; the content of the chalk advertisement
will be the copy of the flyers. Finally, the team will maintain a Facebook page and a Twitter
account, and will post to and tweet at various Florida State groups in order to reach a large
audience of students.
Hopefully, these methods of advertising will come together and create a pool of interviewees for
the research team. The interviewees will be asked to call a number or send an email to a
particular address, and both of these forms of communication will lead back to the office techs in
the office space the team maintains. These office techs will be students working part-time and
paid minimum wage; their job will include talking to interviewees and scheduling interviews. The
office techs will also send a reminder call to the interviewee a week before the interview, and
will call to follow up after the interview is completed as necessary. The office techs will work
three hour shifts from 8am to 8pm; they will work in three hour shifts, with four office techs on
site at any time. The techs will also hold onto the reward money; to deter theft, the money will
be counted each week and the serial numbers will be recorded before the interviews start. The
office techs will be a very integral part of the success of the interviews.
The interviews will require permission from several important entities in order to be successful.
Transportation Services will have to be on board in order to send out the emails for recruitment;
the President, the Provost, and other high-level administrators must be made aware of the
research, if nothing else so that the importance of the research team’s work is understood. The
Research Ethics body for Florida State must approve all methods and instruments used;
furthermore, the legal team should be made aware of the research in case of any problems.
Finally, maintenance and police should be made aware as a courtesy; people will be going in
and out of the office space constantly, and there will be people wandering around parking lots
and garages, so it is best both these entities are made aware of the situation. Overall, with the
cooperation and support of all of these people and entities, the research will be a success.
The interviews are vital to understanding the bigger picture—it will uncover how students really
feel about various aspects of student parking, and why they feel that way. Once the research is
completed, the analysis will prove to be very important every step of the way in future research.
With luck, the interviews will go well and will provide excellent insight.
b. SWOT Analysis
Strengths
The research team and Florida State possess many strengths that will help guide this
research to success. These strengths include: the team’s organizational skills, which will help
keep the team focused, on task, and successful, as well as allowing for neat organization of all
interview-related materials; the team’s ability to think on our feet, which will aid us in conducting
the interviews (responding to questions as necessary) and in case of any contingencies; the
team’s ability to work together as a group, so that we all agree on direction and actions; the
team’s technological literacy, so that we can accurately store, retrieve, and analyze the audio-
visual recordings of interviews; Florida State’s spacing and monetary resources; Transportation
Services’ ability to contact a large number of students and be seen as a reputable entity;
manpower (hiring a lot of students for not a lot of money); being good listeners and being
people-people (allows us to conduct excellent interviews); and having analytical skills, which will
allow us to best understand the responses. Overall, these strengths will be vital in the success
and analysis of the interviews.
Weaknesses
However, there are also a few weaknesses that will hurt the team’s ability to successfully
interview students. These weaknesses, with some management, can be reduced or eliminated.
They are: funding (Florida State may have the resources to support us but may choose to
allocate them elsewhere); office space (again, Florida State may have the ability to give us the
office space we need, but may choose to give it to another group instead); and impatient
students (students may not wish to be interviewed for so long; if the team offers a better reward,
it may help). These weaknesses are not critical, though they may hinder success; dealing with
them will not be impossible, but may take a little work.
Opportunities
There are several opportunities Florida State provides the research team that will greatly
aid in the completion of the interviews; these opportunities were provided merely by chance,
and were not artificially created. These include: a student population that uses social media
networking sites, which will allow us to contact a large part of our population via social media; a
large school population, which will allow us to hire enough workers and interview enough
students; a student population that responds positively to monetary rewards, as this will help us
get enough students to be interviewed; Florida State’s status as a research institution, which will
provide us with the tools we need to analyze the results of our interviews; Florida State’s
technological integration, which will allow us access to audio-visual devices to record the
interviews with; and a large population of students who park on campus, which means our
population is large to draw a sample from. These opportunities will make the task of completing
the interviews much easier, and should not be taken for granted.
Threats
There are, unfortunately, some threats which may affect the interviews; these are
beyond anyone’s control, and can merely be mitigated if they occur. These include: a largely
apathetic student body, which will lower our response rates; pushback from various entities or
groups of people, including the university, Transportation Services, or any other group who does
not want to spend the time or the money to improve the parking system; losing workers, due
either to them leaving the job or the team firing them; unrest among the group, which will cause
the interviews to be poorly conducted (or they may cease to be conducted at all) while the group
figures out the best direction to take; and not being able to hire enough workers due to the
nature of the job, or the state of the economy around Florida State. These threats will hopefully
not affect the team, but if they should, they will simply have to be dealt with as they happen.
c. BOSCARD Report
Background
The research team is conducting these interviews, along with other research, in the
hopes of finding and understanding secondary factors that affect parking at Florida State; with
these interviews in particular, the group hopes to get a deeper understanding of parking from a
student’s perspective, including what they find to be the most troublesome aspects of student
parking.
Many groups will benefit from this research; this includes the students, whose input may
result in a much better, more efficient parking system; the university, who can improve their
parking system, or who will have meaningful insights to reference in building new parking
structures; and any future research the team conducts, as the insights and possible solutions
provided by the students in the interviews will guide and inform future research endeavors on
the topic.
Objectives
With these interviews, the team hopes to: create a full picture of student attitudes
towards and beliefs about parking at Florida State; to conduct enough interviews that we are
able to find trends and patterns of beliefs/attitudes; to complete the interviews on budget and on
time; to follow up with data as necessary; and to get a consensus as to what the main problems
with student parking at Florida State are. We believe the interviews will accomplish these
objectives.
Scope
The interviews are focused primarily on student parking at Florida State; as a result,
anyone who is not a student, or who does not park in student parking, is excluded from the
interviews. Furthermore, the interviews are only focused on parking on Florida State’s main
campus; parking anywhere outside of the main Tallahassee location is excluded. Finally, the
study excludes parking outside of Florida State in Tallahassee, or anywhere else in the country
or the world.
Constraints
There will be, unfortunately, some factors that will constrain the team (and our ability to
complete interviews). These factors are: that some parts of the student population will not be
represented because they do not park on campus or do not drive a car (making our population
smaller, and our advertising more specific); that student parkers will not have broad opinions,
because they will be based on the time of day the students park (which means that answers will
be slightly different depending on the person); and that some students do not park enough, or
do not move their car enough, to know enough to be helpful during the interview (meaning we
will get many “not sure” responses out of the students, rendering their interview less
meaningful). There are other constraints that apply to all interviews, these included; they are:
not everyone in the target population will respond, making the sample size necessarily smaller
than the population; some students who are interviewed will be too nervous to give any good
answers; and some students will not consent to being recorded, making the sample size even
smaller than the target population. These constraints are just as important as the ones specific
to our research, and should not be overlooked.
Assumptions
There are several necessary assumptions the team makes about the interviews that are
worth noting. These include: that we will get enough responses that the results will reveal
patterns and trends; that our interviews will be accurate (that is to say, questions will be worded
in the most useful way possible); that our respondents will not lie or answer in any way that is
untrue; that the majority of students on campus drive (or at least park); that staff will not have
much of an opinion on parking (or, if they do, they are in the minority); that there are
inefficiencies in parking; that our questions will be free from bias (or other negative effect); and
that we will have enough time to get the response rate we need. These assumptions should be
taken into consideration when evaluating our plans and results, as they guide most decisions
the team has made and will make.
Risks
There are some risks that the team faces in performing this research. These include:
being unable to gather all the information we need (due to low response rates or otherwise);
attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviors changing throughout the semester; natural disaster or other
unforeseen contingency greatly affecting the team’s ability to complete interviews; respondents
being dishonest during the interview (due to lack of interest or otherwise); and students having
parking stickers, but failing to use them (they ride the bus, or ride a bike, etc.). These risks
cannot be completely removed from the situation, but the team can respond to them as they
occur; for being unable to gather all the information we need, for example, the team can extend
the time for the interviews to be completed from one semester to two. Each risk can be handled
in a way that is positive and allows the research to still be completed.
Deliverables
Throughout the project, the team will create several deliverables. The first is this plan
document; the team will also create the actual interview script. The team will then create
transcripts and analyses for each interview; and, at the end of the interview period, will create a
detailed and thorough final report.
d. AOA Diagram
See attached file.
e. Email and Flyer Examples
See attached files.
f. Interview Script
1. What year are you?2. Do you live on campus?3. What type of vehicle do you drive?4. Do you carpool to campus?5. Where are the majority of your classes located?6. How long does it take to get to class from where you normally park?7. What time of day do you usually park?8. How long do you stay parked on campus?9. Do you park closest to your first class or your last class?Why?10. In your experience, what is the best time to find parking on campus?Why?11. Has parking gotten better, worse, or stayed the same since you've been at Florida State?Why?12. What time of day do you think most people park on campus?13. Do you think the buses are a good alternative to parking?Why?14. Where's the best place to find parking on campus?
Why? (If not explained)15. What is good about parking at Florida State?16. What is bad about parking at Florida State?17. How do you feel about the current parking fees?18. How do you feel about parking enforcement?How do you feel about parking citations?Is the amount for a citation fair?19. If you could add a new parking garage, where would you put it?20. If you could change only one thing about the parking system, what would it be?Why?21. Do you think carpooling would help create more parking spots?Why?22. Do you think parking is in convenient locations to campus?Why/not?23. Is the time you leave the house affected by how long it takes to find parking?24. How much time do you spend parked on a given day?25. In your opinion, are there enough parking spots at Florida State?26. Anything to add about parking at Florida State?