scientific research method

Music is known to affect human behavior, in particular consumer behaviors. Numerous studies have shown that different types of music affect people in different ways. Today, I am going to conduct a research on whether background music played in the supermarket affects consumer’s desire to purchase.
The operational definition I choose for the hypothesis would be ‘Background music in a supermarket stimulates the consumer’s desire to buy more.’ I am going to conduct this research through using scientific experiment method. The main advantage of this method is its ability to limit alternative explanations and to infer direct causal relationships. I believe it is the best and only way to directly prove a cause and effect relationship between music and how much people buy. In addition, this experiment does not take up a lot of time and is not difficult to replicate. It also does not violate the four ethics of research: informed consent are given by participants, no potential harmful effects on the participants exists, results are kept confident, and the participants are debriefed on the procedure and results. However, the disadvantage of this experiment is that its conditions might be too controlled, making it inapplicable to other situations.
In this hypothesis, music would be the independent variable and how much consumers buy would be the dependent variable. 200 randomly individuals would be selected and divided into two groups equally, the experimental and control group. These two groups of people would be observed while they shop for a certain period of time, from 8 a.m. to 8.p.m on a Friday. Music would be played when the experimental group goes into the market and shop; as for the control group, music would not be played. The observer would then record the number of items purchased and the total dollar amount spent of each group.
To draw an effective cause and effect conclusion from this experiment, confounding variables such as the participants’ health and stress has to be adequately controlled. So when conclusions are drawn, we know the dependent variable is solely affected by the independent variable. We assume individual differences among participants will be equally distributed between the two groups because they are decided through random selection and chance alone determines group assignment. In addition to controlling individual differences and confounding variables, environmental difference and expectation effects must be controlled. We have to limit the differences of the environment of the supermarket such as temperature, brightness, cleanliness and the prices of products; so that the consumer’s comfort in the supermarket and the price does not act as a variable when they are making decisions to buy. The expectation effect can be easily avoided by adopting the double-blind procedure. We need to make sure the workers in the supermarket does not try to provide better service because they expect music increases people’s desire to shop and wanting to prove that right, and we need to avoid having the customers deliberately buying more or buying less because of their expectations. As expectation effect is eliminated, we altogether can eliminate confirmation bias, participant bias, and social desirability bias.
We then replicate this experiment multiple times in different supermarkets with some differences in the confounding variables and independent variable, such as changing the temperature in the environment or the type of music played. By replicating, we can ensure the internal validity and reliability of our data.
The results of the experiment turned out to be that on average people on the experimental group bought 25% more. Through a chi-square test, we get huge chi-square value, indicating that there is a statistically significant difference in the amount consumption between the two groups. In conclusion, we accept the hypothesis that ‘Background music in a supermarket would stimulate the consumer’s desire to buy more.’