| 4.7.1 Population
A population is the abstract idea of a large group of many cases from which a researcher draws a sample and to which results from a sample are generalized. In simple terms it consists of all elements or individuals, items or objects whose characteristics are being studied. The concretely specified large group of many cases from which a researcher draws a sample is also called the target population (Neuman, 2006). The population in this research consists of hotels in Ghana that have web sites.
4.7.2 Sampling Frame
The sampling frame for any probability sample is a complete list of all cases in the population from which your sample will be drawn. It is simply a listing of the population of interest (Saunders, et al., 2000; Curvin and Slater, 2007; Neuman, 2006). As the research purpose and questions or objectives in this study focuses on hotels that have websites, the sampling frame is complete list of all hotels in Ghana with web sites.
However there is no existing list of hotels in Ghana with web sites. In order to get access we needed to get a list of existing hotels with web address (URL). To create this list; a web search using the key words Hotels and Ghana in two search engines (Google and Yahoo), three local directories (Yellow pages, hotel association of Ghana, Ghana tourism board ), two travel directories (Trip adviser and hotels in Ghana) was used. Using web search to identify a study population has been used by many researchers for the identification and study of online practices (Gilbert, et al., 1999; Murphy, 1996; Sigala, 2003). Many researchers such as O’Connor, (2002); Zott et al., (2000) and Chen, (2001) have highlighted the appropriateness in using web search to identify a study’s population for the identification and study of online practices.
The Web search was conducted in May 2011 and after adding up the results from each search engine, and travel directories a total of 624 hotels with web addresses was found. The results of the Web search including hotels’ names, addresses, and URL were copied and pasted into a hotel database in a Microsoft Excel file. Considering the fact that, the Web sites of several hotels were listed in more than two directories and/or search engines the database was filtered to eliminate data duplication. The remove duplicate tool in Microsoft Excel was used to eliminate multiple entries. Finally, we arrived at 226 hotels with Web sites. All 226 Web sites were visited for the following reasons: (a) investigate whether the Web sites existed and were functional at the time the research was conducted, (b) get an overall picture of the category of the hotels, and (c) investigate whether contact information is provided. It was found that some of the Web sites were not functioning so we took them out of the database and arrived at 215. All the 215 hotel Web sites had their contact information (email address, telephone number and postal addresses) published. However, a careful examination of the database revealed that multiple entries of contact information existed. Upon investigating the reason for the latter, it was found that in Several Web sites, the contact information provided were the same, because the hotel were chain hotels hence was managed under the same owner. Similar to Sigala (2003) we decided not to require information for more than one hotel property to avoid duplicate responses from the same hotel property that will result in artificially increasing the response rate and also biasing the results. Thus the database was checked for multiple entries and finally arrived at 206 unique hotels with web site address and contacts information as well as their locations forming the sampling frame.
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