Proposal

The trend in Business research is to collect primary data.  For example, all of the recent doctoral student graduates in Management have all collected primary data as part of their dissertations, as well as in conjunction with faculty members as co-investigators on research projects.  Both qualitative and quantitative data are collected from numerous respondents, ranging from perhaps only 20 individual interviews to as many as 300 or 400 individual survey respondents.  

All of this data needs to be collected in or eventually converted to electronic format.  For the qualitative data, the electronic format allows programs such as nVivo to analyze the text and determine patterns, trends, etc.  For the quantitative data, the electronic format allows for easy input into statistical programs such as SPSS, SAS, Lisrel, and Mplus.  If the data were collected in electronic format initially, this would greatly facilitate the research process.    

Tablets would provide a number of educational benefits to the PhD students:

1) Tablets would provide familiarity and mobility to the potential respondents.  Our PhD students could go on location for data collection with technology that is familiar to respondents, thus increasing likelihood of responses.  The samples students select from (e.g., professional business people, emergency responders, health care providers) are all accustomed to electronic data collection.  Using a tablet to enter data for the typical sample in business research is intuitive, and expected.  The familiarity would increase the likelihood of responding. 

2)  The use of tablets to collect data would improve the quality of the data, as coding errors would be decreased.  Because the data are collected electronically, coding errors in transcribing answers to interview questions will be eliminated.  Coding errors that would occur from entering data collected with a paper-and-pencil survey would also be eliminated.  The reduction in errors would increase the accuracy of the results.

3) Tablets would make the collection and analysis of data faster.  Data collected using tablets can be analyzed much more quickly, as it can be collected in a format compatible with the programs to be used for analyses.  This reduction in time can translate into more productivity, and ultimately more research, strengthening student (and faculty) vitas and improving students’ job opportunities.  Better job placement ultimately helps FAU recruit future PhD students.  And of course, FAU will benefit from the affiliation when students’ research is published.

 A mobile Hot Spot would allow students to collect data using a program called Qualtrics, which the College of Business supports.  This is a web-based tool for building and administering surveys, and thus internet connectivity is necessary to collect data using Qualtrics.  The advantage of Qualtrics is the immediate availability of the data in a usable format for statistical analyses.   The mobile Hot Spot would allow use of Qualtrics, which would make the collection and analysis of data faster.

Mobile Hot Spots would provide for the use of Qualtrics in the field (Qualtrics is a web-based tool for building and administering surveys).

Virgin Mobile (a subsidiary of Sprint) offers a 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot device for $119.  The device connects to 5 devices at a time.

For service, you can pay by month or by day (costs are per device):

 $5/Day – 250MB

$55/Month – 6GB

Activation is simple and done online with a credit card.  Once the device is active it will work for 30 days (or 24 hours if the day plan is chosen).  The account can be set up as a recurring charge where it automatically charges every month, or only used sporadically, in which case it automatically disconnects at the end of 30 days (and future use requires a new online activation).

We are requesting 6 mobile hot spots to support the 30 tablets at a cost of $714.00.  We are also requesting funding for 1 month of hot spot service for the 30 tablets ($55/month x 6 hot spots x 6 months), at a cost of $1980.00. 

Total cost for the 6 hotspots and 6 months of service is estimated at $2694.00

We would purchase the tablets as soon as possible if awarded the grant.  The implementation would then be dependent on doctoral student data collection needs. 

We estimate that the 6 months of hot spot connectivity (which does not have to be used contiguously) could benefit a minimum of 6 students, possibly more if data collections are well-coordinated.