E-commerce - Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Chapter 3: Research design and methodology
3.4 DATA COLLECTION AND SAMPLE SIZE
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The researcher administered one hundred and fifty questionnaires (150)
through fax, hand delivery and web-based. The group of respondents
comprised of working class people, credit card holders and student from both
the University of Cape Town and Cape Peninsula University Technology.
These respondents were randomly selected and contacted.
Out of the one hundred and fifty people contacted, fifty (50) respondent return
completed questionnaire. This represent 33% response rate from the
questionnaire. This according to the CPUT MTech research criteria for a mini
thesis can be classified as successful. This success rate was achieved
because the questionnaires were administered electronically. Respondents
see this as more convenient, user friendly and less time consuming than the
manual process. The sample of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix
B.
One advantage of using the survey method is that data collection can be
done through telephone, e-mail, postal and personal survey compared to
case study that requires in-depth study of variables. The cost effect and time
requirement is another useful reason the researchers consider web-based
surveys as appropriate. A significant limitation of this method is the self­
selection sampling procedure (Mathwick, 2002).
The web-based survey was developed to meet the following four objectives;
• easy and quick feedback from respondents is possible with Internet;
• the software program used could be transparently incorporated into the
questionnaire, to prompt respondents for a complete response and to
avoid duplication in the answers;
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