This assignment is a test of your ability to design a research, measure a meaningful aviation construct by constructing your own questionnaire, and write-up how you did so in a style consistent with a proper aviation/management journal article.

Context of this assignment:

The aim of this assignment is for you to do something that you might be asked to do for real. So, imagine that you have graduated and now work in management for a major full service airline. Your CEO is worried about reports that your airline is losing ground, in terms of passenger numbers and profits, to the national airline of a neighbouring country.

As you are trained in research methods, you have been assigned to conduct research to investigate the CEOs concerns. So in this assignment you must explain how you would undertake research to do this.

– To point you in the right direction, for the purpose of this assignment, your research must use a questionnaire to measure passengers ‘level of satisfaction’ with the full service airline where you work and also with the full service airline in the neighbouring country.

1- You must design the questionnaire. When you measure satisfaction, you should assume that you want to measure as much of a passenger’s experience of the airlines as you sensibly can (the final questionnaire should have no more than about 30 questions, excluding those used to ascertain demographic information).

2 – So, your assignment should report how you design an appropriate questionnaire AND how you design the overall research project (e.g., what kind of design is your study).

3 – Outcome

You must write-up your assignment in a style (use APA formatting) 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 include an outline or why ‘level of satisfaction’ with an airline is an important consideration for its economic viability and how it might be measured. Your ‘introduction’ should be around 1000 words. It will require ‘proper’ academic references (e.g. 6 to 12). No hypothesis is required, but you should explain the purpose of the research. Up to 15% of the marks for this assignment will be awarded for the content and clarity of expression of the introduction. Do not write an abstract and do not format your assignment so that it is in multiple columns on each page.

Next, just like a real journal article, you require a method section, which should have participants, materials and procedure sub-headings. Under the appropriate sub-sections, your write-up should include an explanation of how you would ‘operationalise’ the concept of ‘satisfaction’, in the context of airline 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:

1- how you would get people to fill out your questionnaire,

2- how you would select who would be participants and,

3- how many you would need, and an overview of who the participants would ideally be. You may use a bit of ‘artistic licence’ here; for example, don’t write that participants were two of your flat mates and your dad – write instead that participants were adults who had recently travelled on one or both of the airlines you are surveying.

– Questionnaires are used for a purpose, so you must also explain in detail how you would analyse the completed questionnaires you collect. This will probably be best in the ‘materials’ sub-heading of the method section. The overall method section is worth up to 40% of the marks for this assignment.