Dear scholars, I have a technical question that needs clarification. As employees and customers are the most participants when it comes to the data collection from the questionnaires related to organizations or companies studies. Therefore, there may be some reasons or justifications for the choice to include both employees and customers in the same sample without employing multi-groups analysis. Besides, I am not sure that employees and customers points of views are homogenous and that both can be considered as part of the same population. So, my question is what are the reasons that justify that the employees and customers sample size (i.e. data collected from the questionnaires) can be combined to form the same population of the study? In the other words, from which extend, employees and customers can be homogenous to form the same population of the study?
Dear Jean Baptiste Bernard Pea-Assounga ,
A good question to follow. You have to ensure the same questionnaire is suitable for employees and customers. Pre-testing could benefit in this case. However, the demographic characteristic could separate employees and customers. The advantage of this study, you may study the difference in perceptions among employees and customers, it is depending on your research objectives. Thus, the homogenous is feasible.
All the best,
Jean Baptiste Bernard Pea-Assounga
Both employees and customers are under the name stakeholders. While employees are internal stakeholders, customers are external stakeholders. It is also important to identify another category called clients. There are instances in companies where employees could be considered customers. So, if your research objective is to analyze at the stakeholder level, you can consider them homogeneous. However, if you are interested in internal and external stakeholders disaggregated, they need to be treated as heterogeneous. The nature of the data also needs to be scrutinized.
I hope this would help.
Thank you for your answers. I real appreciate that. It helps me to develop and supports my arguments. Supaprawat Siripipatthanakul , Melkamu Tadesse Wazza
Whether or not they are homogeneous is an empirical question. The only way you can know is to compare their responses. I suspect on some topics they would be, and on others they would not. You should also confirm whether the same questions are appropriate for both groups. My guess is that there are questions that might be appropriate only for customers, questions that are appropriate only for employees, questions that are appropriate for both, and topics that are appropriate for both but that may require different wording.
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