Investigating Internet Marketing Strategies among Hotels in Ghana

According to Saunders, et al, (2000; 2007) researchers must pay particular attention to reliability and validity to reduce the possibility of getting wrong answers. Reliability and validity helps to conduct the research and adds strength to the findings. Validity of a research is the extent to which the instrument measures what it is supposed to measure (Saunders et al., 2000). Whereas reliability of the instrument is concern with the consistency of the responses to the items (Mitchell, 1996). In this study emphasis was placed on the validity and reliability to ensure the credibility of the research.

As mentioned earlier, validity refers to whether the research instruments measure what it is supposed to measure i.e. accuracy of measurement (Sullivan, 2001; Saunders, et al., 2000; 2007). Validity can be internal or external. The following indicates how the validity of this research was ensured:

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  Content validity: content validity or sampling validity refers to whether a measurement instrument has adequate and representative coverage of the concepts in the variables being measured. According to Mitchell, (1996) to establish content validity, researchers must seek expert’s opinion on the representativeness and suitability of the measurement instruments and also suggestion must be allowed to be made to the structure of the instrument. In this research after the initial draft of the questionnaire, experts in the field of e-commerce, marketing and in hotel management were consulted to review its content validity.
  
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  Construct validity: This has to do with measuring an instrument to an overall theoretical framework in order to determine whether the device confirms a series of hypothesis derived from an existing theory. Thus, the instrument must have existing conceptual or theoretical bases in the literature. The questionnaire used in this research was designed based on the items in the internet marketing mix model (sigala, 2003). The model was used to benchmark internet marketing strategies in hotels which led to the extended internet marketing model that is considered as an effective model to measure internet marketing activities. Also to enhance construct validity, data was collected through multiple source: self administered and interviewer administered questionnaire were complemented by the use of Hotel’s web pages
  
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  Face validity: involves assessing whether a logical relationship exist between the variables and the proposed measure. This type of validity is highly subjective; do not provide enough proof of validity. However in this study it seemed logical to us investigate internet marketing strategies of hotels in Ghana using a questionnaire-based survey.