Hi all:

Hoping that everyone's well. I could do with a wee bit of advice in relation to analysing my data. This is for an MRes so not as detailed as per a PhD but I'm a little lost with getting my read around the programme.

In short (hypothetical example here as a cover) I'm looking at the buyer behaviour of international tourists within the UK. I'm looking to analyse how tourists (of different nationalities) behave differently and what drives them to choose particular holidays, and what they expect to get out of the holidays. Now I've attached a label to the different nationalities (in total there's over 20 nationalities in the sample) and I want to measure how different nationalities behave/seek value from their experience. What particular techniques (e.g. regression analysis) can I employ which will provide me with details of the specific different nationalities... Hoping this makes some sort of sense. This masters is part of the bigger (PhD - qualitative based) picture and really worried about the SPSS side of things...

Any help appreciated.

S x

First of all, before you start doing any statistical analysis, make sure that you have a good idea in your mind or on paper of the independent and dependent variables. This will help you understand causality and how different variables interact.

If you are looking at the interaction with interval/scale variables (such as money, age etc) then you will be able to use ANOVA to compare the mean values of all the groups (the nationalities) if you want to see differences between them.

You will also be able to use logistic regression most likely, as well as chi-squares and non-interval correlations etc.

However, this all depends on what your variables are like. Sorry if this makes no sense.

Hiya:

Basically, I'm using my nationalities as the basis, the crux of the study (if that makes sense?). I've asked questions such as:

Q8) Please determine to what extent the following statements to do with a holiday are important to you:

(a) I want a holiday with good weather 1 (No importance) 2 3 4 5 6 7 (Utmost importance)
(b) I want an affordable holiday 1 (No importance) 2 3 4 5 6 7 (Utmost importance)

Respondents have then given a response (from one to seven) for each variable. What I want to do is measure the extent to which say an American and a Canadian tourist places different values of the importance of the variables?

Any help appreciated...

By the looks of it, you will be looking at ANOVA's and t-tests if your samples are large enough and meet the assumptions of these tests. If not, you can use non-parametric tests which do basically the same thing.