The primary research approaches that is used are focus group research, survey research and in-debt interviews to get qualified information.

 

First, the information from the focus group research is collected from three focus groups varying from 6 to 10 attendants. The groups are within three different organizations; chemical industry, education and trading. The focus groups are homogenous because they have relatively similar salaries within the group. Attendant of focus groups are often paid, but the conducted focus groups have not been paid in this research. Each focus group last approximately 30-40 minutes. 6-10 people is a small sample and is not drawn from a random population but through the groups network which mostly consist of foreign owned companies and organizations in China and may not consist of very good examples of target groups(                             ).

 

Secondly, survey researches have been conducted to assess people’s knowledge, beliefs, preferences and satisfaction to measure these magnitudes in the general population. The survey that has been conducted (                                 ) was done on paper instead of online to answer questions the respondents have. The survey is in both English and Mandarin in order to reach a larger sample of the Chinese market. Totally 67 surveys have been answered. To achieve more reliable results a larger sample size is recommended. According to the convenience sample size, the research requires a sample of 2,568 samples to achieve an fully reliable answer for the research. However, this is not possible to realize it in one month. Consequently, we decided to reduce the sample size to n=67. The people we conducted for the survey had an above average income in Shanghai as it is the target group of Ekornes Stressless.

 

Referring to our sample size of 67 with a confidence interval of 5%, two-tailed, the sample variance equals to 2.04 [1]. The distribution of the sample is relatively wide spread.

Furthermore, we are aware of the fact that the sample is not unbiased. It always contains some bias. For instance, the buying decision always depends on the income people gain. If people earn below RMB 50,000 per month they might not consider buying high-end living room furniture. Furthermore, the personal preferences will influence the colour of the furniture. Hence, it was the group’s task to minimize the biases by amending some questions accordingly. Therefore, we asked the Chinese people if they would have a lot of money, are they then considering to buy a Stressless sofa or recliner. 

 

Last, the in-depth interview is conducted with as a direct one to one interview with a businessperson Chinese business professional. The in-debt interview makes it possible to get deeper knowledge about the interviewed individual’s buying behaviors, opinions, values, sentiments and knowledge about Stressless and sofas and recliners in general. 

Research
Instruments

In our survey and focus group a variety of research instruments has been used. The different qualitative research techniques that we have used have consisted of unstructured and structures measurement approaches. The unstructured measurement approach permits a range of possible responses. This has been done by given open questions like word association in the survey. The structured measurement approaches consists of closed end questions of multiple choice and importance scale questions. We have chosen to use different types of questions in order to get quantitative results and to get deeper knowledge with open-end questions. The focus groups have consisted of qualitative research since the purpose is to get deeper knowledge of the opinions and preferences of the group.