Reflect on your own experience with housing as a graduate student.

1. Survey Research
Case: The Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

2. MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
• Business objective is to increase the volume of students who rent Harvard houses, verses private
homes, by 40% more among graduate school students.
• HRES team wants to know how their housing development should be designed to most likely appeal
to Harvard students, and most likely reach their goal of obtaining their residency.

3. MARKETING RESEARCH OBJECTIVE
• Narrowed down scope of the management problem.
• To determine how to design the housing, which attributes students care about most, and if
designing the housing in such specific ways would better guarantee that students would
choose to live in the Harvard student housing over private housing.
• The marketing research topics in the 2005 survey must explore:
o Are costs, space and location still the most important to current students when
choosing between student verse private housing.
o The weight of importance between each variable.
o Which variable is the most desired.
o Do students (current and prospective) choose a school verse another based on these
variables.
o Are cost, space, and location of housing actual variables that student’s research and
contemplate when deciding between schools.

4. RESEARCH DESIGN
• Research design is descriptive- interest, desires, perceptions, behaviors
• Cross-sectional design-survey will be give and information collected only once
• Multiple cross-sectional - involve sampling each of the 10 different Harvard schools
• Many options of carrying out research- telephone interviewing, personal interviewing, mail
interviewing, or electronic interviewing, email link

5. SECONDARY DATA SOURCES
• They are trying to identify the exact problem, formulate a potential hypotheses about the situation,
develop an approach to solving their problem, and understanding the audience that will be
their study participants.
• For little cost, a short amount of time and effort, the team could gather such secondary research as:
o Past research performed on student housing, internal and external data sources.
o External research performed on competing schools housing.
o External articles that have focused on student opinions of student housing, and specifically Harvard
students.

6. SCALE QUESTIONS
• Small, single iteration survey : within 25 mins Relevant to marketing research objective topics.
• Simple layout –No jargons Important features to be rated in response
• Pairwise comparison of some important features
• Since it is web-survey, provide a counter of progress on web page
• Provide more radio buttons than drop down lists

7. RECOMMENDATIONS
• Include Staff as well in Survey process as vision for Allston is “urban, community and
campus environment”.
• Questionnaire to students regarding housing with varied school composition
• Questionnaire to students examining student life in greater detail (socialization forms
etc.)
• From previous survey we can keep
o current housing
o Expectations from housing
o importance of housing features
o about yourself
• From previous survey we can remove
o Transportation sec.: in 4 years less chance to change
• From previous survey we can modify
o Individual preference: results can be interpreted from previous survey and
“importance of housing features” section of current survey