Background of the Study
Newtonville is a city in Massachusetts in the United States that borders Boston. Newtonville, Census, and Information (2012, para. 1) identified that the city has an estimated population of 85,000 people. The Newtonville District Council has a Leisure Services Department responsible for creating and promoting outdoor and park leisure areas.
The Leisure Services Department is grateful for the working relationship that has developed for years with the local community. The department relies on the community for acquiring expertise and program developments in volunteers with the ability to coordinate leisure activities.
The department has a 9+variety of parks that include Harvard Square Park, Fenway Park, Hunnewell Park, Arnold Arboretum, Larz Anderson Park, Jamaica Pond, Menotomy Rocks Park, Corey Hill Outlook, and Chestnut Hill Reservoir. There is indoor leisure such as golf course, swimming pools, playgrounds, and Zoo.
The department has established programs such as the Colonie Youth Service Wrap-Around Program, South Shore LGBT Seniors, The Newton dining out for seniors over 65, over-the-rainbow-supper-club, the Greater Brockton Tortoise Walking Group, Belmont Area Walking Group, and the Women’s Travel Group (Meetup 2012, para.1).
The relationship of the department and the community is that the department provides memorable experience for the local population. However, the department is facing financial difficulties of maintaining and improving its established leisure programs because of economic crisis and pressure on available funds. The department wants to involve local residents in the planning and organizing of leisure activities and the local business community in sponsoring such developments and changes.
The projects will develop when the department forms partnerships successfully with the business community. The department, therefore, has the responsibility of convincing the business community to accept the proposal of forming the partnership through convincing them of good business opportunities.
The department requested a proposal on the issue to find means of attracting and maintaining potential sponsors from the business community. The study will target the people with interest in rock climbing, camping, swimming, dog walking, and visiting parks (Trenberth 2005, p.5).
Objectives of the Study
The study will focus on acquiring high acceptance from the public and commercial interests. The study will aim to increase the range of the target market share, volunteers to work in the communal leisure and parks, and the focus on needs and wants of the families in the community. The study will also attract the interest and attention of sponsors and seek the ways to improve the facilities essential for the operations of the recreation centers and parks.
The study will ensure that the leisure service department is responsible for facilities and programs provided after the partnership with local and business communities. The partnership will be for building and fostering a good relationship through creating leisure opportunities for everybody, promoting healthy lifestyle, and offering quality facilities, services, and programs to the community.
The study will evaluate the opportunities that businesspeople have to increase their image and reputation in sponsoring the Leisure Service Department (Mowen, Kyle, Borrie & Graefe 2006, p.89).
Methodology
The study will use observation and exploration to establish the relationship between the potential of the leisure programs and the outcomes expected when the leisure service department forms partnerships with the business and local community.
The research will emphasize accuracy, reliability, dependability, and satisfaction of the data collected to enable its approval for professional use. Quantitative research designs will avoid missing some of the important details in the investigation. The data will be analyzed statistically and presented in graphs, tables, and theoretically to enable easy derivation of data by the user.
Research Design
A research design will be necessary in this research to convert research questions into an investigation project. In research, research design is in two forms, quantitative and qualitative research designs. Quantitative research method can be experimental, descriptive, or causal depending on the objectives of the research.
In this research, quantitative research design will analyze the case study using the meaning of the objectives and the framework of events and consider the study in a flexible manner to bring out the importance of the business and local community sponsorships in the leisure programs. The quantitative research method will allow the collected data to be treated statistically.
The statistics acquired will be essential in this study to determine the amount of influence the department has enforced and the capacity to succeed in attracting potential sponsors for leisure programs. Moreover, a large sample is to be in the research to acquire reliable and dependable information. The study will make the adjustments and changes required to improve the influence of the proposal to the community (Pride 2010, p.83).
According to Cameron (2009, p.135), the study will include the examination of four aspects that include the responsibility of the Leisure Service Department to improve the performance of facilities and programs after the partnership with the local and business community. The study will to build and foster relationship through creating leisure opportunities and benefits for everybody, promoting healthy lifestyle, and offering quality facilities, services, and programs to the community.
The quantitative research design will use statistical tools, such as sum, mean, and standard deviation successfully to establish the relationship between the various variables of the study that include satisfaction of the sponsors, teenagers, adults, and children in the leisure programs and the increase in the financial capability of the programs.
A properly implemented and designed study can convince the business community the significance and meaning of sponsoring leisure programs (Gauthier, Lariviere, Pong, Snelling & Young 2010, p.67).
The study brings out the demand of the leisure indoors and parks in Newtonville because of the ability of the activities to reduce stress after work, promote the health of different people, and create happiness to participants. The community should volunteer in managing leisure activities in the community to help develop and change it for the better of everybody.
The business community can support leisure destinations to create good reputation essential for the success of their business. The business community that supports the events will acquire the opportunity of promoting and selling their products or services in the parks and other leisure destinations (Buswell, Zabriskie, Lundberg & Hawkins 2012, p.184).
According to Trenberth and Dewe (2002, p.68), confirmatory data analysis technique will draw the important concepts of the study to make the final report of the data collected from the research. This helps to improve the satisfaction of the users of the findings by ensuring that only the necessary data is analyzed. Among these variables are facilities, quality of the park, and the standard of indoor programs among many other factors.
The research design used calls for sponsors from the business and local community to come to terms with the nature of leisure demand, with a view of improving the demand and customer satisfaction levels among the local population. Therefore, the collected data should be very accurate, dependable, and reliable as much as possible to users (Marshall 2010, p.234).
Data Collection
Data collection is a concept used to exemplify a procedure of organizing and gathering information in research work, either as a fraction of a process development or comparable assignment. The main intention for data collection is to acquire information that can prove the existing relationship between the existence of the department and its impacts on the community.
Therefore, in this research, data will be collected from primary and secondary sources to meet the main objectives of the study that include developing a better understanding of the needs, wants, and satisfaction levels associated with leisure activities and attractions to promote the leisure programs in a community.
In addition, the data will also help in categorizing the various leisure activities that the Newtonville District Council should promote. Through the information collected, it will be easier to implement some strategies that could help improve the lifestyle of people at Newtonville. This is because from the research, various leisure programs that Leisure Service Department promotes will be realized (Liu & Ko 2011, p.263).
Therefore, the method of data collection recommended includes a study of primary and secondary sources such as journals, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and scholarly books and primary sources, such as conducting focus group discussions and observation. Secondary sources usually vary broadly and this leads to examination of the issues at hand in detail.
The issues include researching a deposit of preset questions as it is in the case in the research requirements. Moreover, they strengthen the research process to convey the findings at length. Therefore, by employing descriptive research as a data collection method in this research, the researcher will be sure of detailing comments on the events, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of the local community in Newtonville towards leisure activities and programs.
Nevertheless, through information provided by the sources, the research will be in a better position of solving various issues concerning the needs, wants, and the satisfaction levels of the local population. This is therefore the main reason about the recommendation of using secondary and primary sources for this research (Gwinner & Eaton1999, p.49).
In addition, descriptive technique of data collection is appropriate because it enables the researcher to attain or collect detailed information concerning the issue at hand. The data is very important because Newtonville is to be among the best regions in attracting community development and changes in the leisure sector and statistics show that many of the programs are not sponsored. Moreover, customer satisfaction has become a necessity within this important service sector.
In this context, the user expects high quality data. This research will therefore focus on the ever-increasing needs, preferences, and satisfaction levels associated with the local population in engaging in leisure activities, especially those that promote their health and experience (Thompson 2012, p.498).
The quality of the findings of this study would be increased by ensuring that there is internal and external validity for the collected data. In addition, construct validity would be assured through ensuring that the constructs of the study are representing the actual reality of that exist in the study population.
Sample Plan
Sampling deals with the selection of a subset of individuals from within a population. This study will make use of both random and stratified sampling methods. These sampling methods will be advantageous in this research because they will allow low costs, homogeneity, fast data collection, and enhancement of accuracy and quality of the data collection process.
This study has a target population that depicts that characteristics required by the researcher and it comprises of the community and the business people living in Newtonville. Therefore, in this research, the target population includes the business and local community in Newtonville.
Because of limited financial and time resources, the research will only focus on the most relevant sources to accomplish the research issues at hand. This is because it is not easy to collect information from all sources. The population under study will comprise teenagers, children, and adults visiting the indoor leisure and parks for leisure (Doyle 2008, p.43).
To achieve the research using the sampling method, it is vital to choose a sampling frame to help in identifying every a single component in the sample. Consequently, the researcher would be interested in a sample frame that contains the features of the study population and may include all those community and business members (people) that live within Newtonville and could help in the survey. Therefore, the sampling frame will use a random and stratified sampling frame to avoid any risk of bias.
Therefore, each member in the population will have the same opportunities to participate for the sample. This sampling technique is appropriate because it allows all people in the population to participate in the research, hence eliminating bias problems. In addition, the method is easy and cost-effective since it only needs a considerate number of people that the research can accommodate in financial terms and in time management (Alexandris, Douka & Balaska 2012, p.58).
The target population will comprise of 10,000 people, and the research will consider 6,000 for the participants in the research process. Among the 6,000 people, 1000 participants will be the business community and the remaining 5000 will be the local community with the potential of sponsoring the Leisure Service Department.
Data Analysis and Presentation Techniques
Data analysis is the procedure of investigating, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the objective of emphasizing essential information, offering recommendations on conclusions, and sustaining decision-making. Thus, this research will employ descriptive statistics analysis technique because it provides well-planned explanations and details concerning the research problem.
The quantitative study will examine the satisfaction of the potential sponsors in supporting the programs and the influence of the research proposal presented. The research will seek to establish the segments of the potential sponsors, travel patterns, their attractions, length of leisure time, and their experiences in the leisure attractions (Fitzen 2009, p.48).
The data analysis will provide the investigation with the essential information, recommendations, and conclusions on the financial problem facing the Leisure Services Department. The data of the study will be analyzed descriptively to provide the department with information on the market and sponsor fast enough to restore its finances and improve services to the community.
Coding will categorize the issues derived from the research. Data reduction will present the data collected into tables and figures. The data collected will be interpreted in a theoretical and practical form to help the user derive the information he or she needs easily (Cheng-Hsui, Ya-Hui, & Feng-Chun 2012, p.262).
The research will measure their expenses in leisure and expectations. However, there are many government and private sector efforts to improve the level of leisure events in the local community. Therefore, the data analysis techniques will be geared at increasing the market share of the sector, as it is one effective way of promoting healthy lifestyles of people in the community.
This is important because the health sector comes with many risks that could affect the whole countries government expenditure. The leisure business is successful because of the public opinions therefore; the study will have the purpose of discovering the public and the businesspeople opinion records (Creswell 2009, p.46).
Conclusion
This study is by the need to have a better understanding of the needs and satisfaction levels associated with leisure programs in the community level. Many people in the communities complain of lack of support of sponsors in their programs. This research will identify the programs to find potential sponsors who satisfy the organizers of the program. Moreover, member satisfaction has become a necessity within this important service sector.
The analysis mainly constitutes of the reserve situation, communal surroundings, and administration settings. These controls are supplementary mediated by the research assessment of individual members of the programs according to his or hers socioeconomic actions, intellectual characteristics, knowledge, customs, feelings, and predilection. An analysis of the individual members will measure the potential of the leisure program to develop and change in quality and standards.
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