AIM flag flying in Table Tennis tournament at IIMA

I shall start with the good news first. Today Me and Nirav have entered into the Quarter-finals of Intra-IIMA table tennis tournament here. If we win 2 more matches we would play against each other in the finals here. It would be an irony that two students from AIM would make it to the finals here. Apparently IIMA has 660 students and 68 students are from IIMA from the total list of 70 players. Now its 8/70 left and me and Nirav are two out of those eight :-).

Yesterday we also visited the Garbas at NID (National Institute of Design) along with the other ISEP students and IIMA students. Although the music and the crowd was not up to expectations (NID is known for its sophisticated student community); we enjoyed dancing with the foreign students and the IIMA community. It was fun teaching foreign students some Garba steps and the enthusiasm was clearly visible once they got hooked to the music. However when I came back to the dorm around 1:30 am I was told by my Marketing research group that I would be presenting the case for tomorrow. It was tough to prepare on such a short notice but that being my first presentation here, I gleefully accepted it. The case was about Boston's fight against young drug addicts. With the number of young drug users increasing with each passing day, Boston's mayor was worried and hence gave a project to 5 students of Harvard MBA to come out with a plan as to how should he send an effective message to the students and what medium should he use. They were given a time frame of 5 months and a budget of US$20,000. Out of the three options i.e surveys, FGD and Depth interviews the student decided to conduct FGD (total 11) with the students randomly selected from the community school nearby, in the age group of 10-13 and 14-18 as they represented the primary group that was into drugs. However after four months of research they were not sure with the results and one of the MBA Grad even thought he already knew all the information they had collected through FGD. The insight with regards to this case was that FGD's are used generally for generating ideas. FGD's are exploratory in nature while surveys and experimentation are conclusive in nature. I am sharing the table of Qualitative and Quantitative research here.

	Qualitative (EX: Focus Groups, Depth interviews, Projective Techniques)	Quantitative (Ex: Surveys )
Objective	To gain a qualitative understanding of the underlying reasons and motivations	To quantify the data and generalize the results from the sample to the population of interest.
Sample	Small number of non-representative cases	Large number of representative cases.
Data Collection	Unstructured	Structured
Data Analysis	Non statistical	Statistical
Outcome	Develop an initial understanding	Recommend a final course of Action

Thus it is clear that FGD can not help you decide on a course of action. My recommendation was to Conduct the FGD and get some testable propositions on the basis of the insights. Finally decide the course of action on the basis of survey questionnaires. Qualitative research should always precede Quantitative research. That was all for my presentation. I am going for Garba to Karnavati club which is one of the most happening Garba events here.