Pre-testing and Final Administration

Saunders, et al., 2000; and Copper & Schindler, 2006 are of the view that, it is important to pre-test questionnaires to ensure reliability and validity before final administration. The purpose of pretesting is to refine the questionnaire so that respondents will not have problems in answering the questions (Saunders, et al., 2000). Although the questionnaire was constructed from our research questions and an adopted model from literature, it was necessary to pre-test the research instrument to curtail any unforeseen ambiguity.

In this study the pre testing was done in two stages; the initial draft of the questionnaire was consulted with two master’s students in marketing and one marketing lecturer in a face to face interview to access its content and constructions. They checked for any phrasing and relatedness of the statements within the questions for better adjustments and compatibility with Ghana’s environment. With feedback about the questionnaire some modifications were made to the primary questionnaire.

In the second stage of the pre-testing, a pilot study was performed with ten (10) hotel managers to check and approve the final questionnaire. They answered the questionnaire and indicated any ambiguous and difficult to understand questions. Some ambiguous expressions were modified. The final version of the questionnaire is in Appendix A.

The final questionnaire was administered to the sampled hotels through personal contact by the researchers (Edem and Charles) and five (5) trained research assistants - all students of the Catering and Hotel management department of Ho Polytechnic. Prior to arrival at the hotels, telephone calls are place to book appointment with the respondents. The respondents were mainly different from hotel to hotel depending on the persons that handle the hotel marketing activities or have knowledge of the hotel internet marketing activities. When we come into contact with respondents we first informed them of the purpose and the benefits of the study to the hotel sector, assured anonymity and confidentiality of responses. Some of respondents filled their questionnaires in our presence and a few insisted that we leave the questionnaires with them and come back for them in a later date. Upon completion and collection we checked for omissions and draw the respondent’s attention to it.

With other respondents we read the questions to them and they were to indicate to us their responses whiles we did the filling for them. This exercise was done between the periods of 19th July and 29th August 2011.

In order to get a more representative sample, we sorted out the hotels in to the ten regions in Ghana and we divided them among the researchers base on proximity to administer the questionnaire.
Table 4.3 shows the sample design and the response rate according to hotel star category.

Table 4.3 Sample Design and Response Rate