Quantity controls

Government limitations on the amount of foreign currency that can be used or specific transactions, often used in conjunction with tourism.

Quadrant analysis

A variation of cross-tabulation table which, plots responses to rating scale questions into four quadrants on a two dimensional scale. Most quadrant analysis in business or marketing research portrays or plots the relationship between the average responses about a product attribute’s importance and average rating of a brand’s performance with respect to the product feature. It is also sometimes known as importance performance analysis.

Quality function deployment

Often stated as QFD. A system of project management developed for use in very complex situations such as automobiles. Especially useful to new products is the first part – the House of Quality – a careful statement of customer needs and wants for the item being developed, followed by stipulation of technologies that will be used to achieve each of those characteristics.

Qualitative media effect

The positive or negative influence the medium may contribute to the message. The image of the media vehicle can effect reactions to the message. For example, an ad for a high quality men’s clothing might have more of an impact in a fashion magazine than in sports.

Q-sort technique - scaling

General methodology developed to discriminate among relatively large number of objects quickly. It gathers data and processes the collected information; the subjects are assigned the task of sorting a number of statements by placing a specific number of statements in each sorting category; the emphases are on determining the relative ranking of stimuli by individuals and in deriving cluster of individuals who display similar preference ordering of stimuli. For example, respondents are given hundred attitude statements on individual cards and are asked to place them into eleven
piles ranging from “most highly agreed with” to “least highly agreed with”.