A market research case study on harvard graduate housing survey

1. Harvard Graduate Student
Housing Survey
BY GROUP 8-
ARPIT SHARMA
AKASH OJHA
UTKARSH SHIVAM
ROHIT RUPANI

2. QUESTION 1:
What are your feelings, thoughts (e.g., what images come to your mind?) and
emotions as you go along?
 What makes you want to stop, what drives you to continue?
 What are the merits of this questionnaire?
 What are apparent shortcomings?

3. What drives you to
Continue
 Survey focuses on straightforward data that are reliable even though they are self-reported.
 Experienced as a rewarding journey through housing experience.
 A good signal that the administration cares.
Stop
 Survey is too long and boring.
 Some questions were hard to answer (trade-off questions in section F)

4. Merits of the questionnaire
 Survey is thorough.
 Survey focuses on straightforward data that are reliable even though they are self-reported.
 Careful process integrating results with focus groups for better understanding.
 Experienced as a rewarding journey through housing experience.
 Very large number of responses.
 Segmentation/cross-tabulation of results by graduate school interesting and useful for action.
 Replicable over the years for monitoring.
 A good signal that the administration cares.
 Harvard now has at least some numbers where there were none before.
 Simple but useful insights into what students value most (e.g., apartment size secondary as
compared to location and price).

5. Shortcoming
 Survey is too long and boring.
 Too many factual questions. They should be retrieved from somewhere else using the Student ID number.
 Self-selection bias: people who elect to respond the survey are positively pre-disposed towards Harvard real-
estate services.
 Some questions were hard to answer (trade-off questions in section F)
 The survey makes simplistic assumptions about what drives satisfaction (e.g., location and features, instead
of more sophisticated human factors).
 It is not open-ended and fails to create a space where consumers could voice their aspirations.
 Will prove useless to address the organizational goal of defeating the private market.

6. QUESTION 2:
 When looking back at the 2001 survey, what news
did it produce, what impact did it have? can you
attribute this impact to specific features of the
survey or of the survey design process and
circumstances?

7. RESULTS : 2001 SURVEY
 Single students- HPRE dorms; single with children- HPRE apts.; married- private
apts.
 Pvt. apts.: More satisfaction for “Real World Feel”
 HPRE apts.: Satisfaction for convenience, closeness to friends, and “Harvard comm.
Feel”
 Pairwise comparison : Rent (48) vs. Time (52); Space (37) vs. Time (63); Space (28)
vs. Rent (72)
 62% walked to school

8. IMPACT: 2001 SURVEY
 Per-school basis data, enabled each school to assess habits & expectations of its
population
 (Cost, location) more important than space
 Led to design of Double-studio concept
 Close to schools
 Flexible design upgraded to single room apts.

9. CHALLENGES:2005 SURVEY
 Allston Initiative
o Vision Allston
o More community spaces and regular activities unlike old graduate apts. Housing
with/without varied school composition
o Types of apts. to build
o Housing with/without varied school composition
 Get student data with minute details like dining, Entertainment habits; forms of
socialization
 Add/modify/remove questions from 2001 survey to come up with 2005 survey

10. QUESTION 3:
 if not a survey, what else would you recommend to
understand the customer in a way that would inform
long range planning of Allston?

11. RECOMMENDATIONS
 Focus groups, interviews, conversations
 Institutional data
 Collect other (non-survey) data