A Pro-Environmental Method of Sample Size Determination to Predict the Quality Level of Products Considering Current Customers’ Expectations

Abstract

The main factor that conditions the success of organizations is the development of products oriented toward customer satisfaction. An additional attribute of organizations is the use of sustainable development rules. The use of these rules and the simultaneous desire to create high-quality products encourage organizations to apply different methods to, for example, eliminate waste. This study aimed to develop a method to determine the research sample size required to predict a product’s quality level, taking into account current customers’ expectations. This method was developed by modifying a procedure to determine the research sample size as part of the calculated estimator of the mean value in the general population. Based on the concept of product sustainability development, the goal of the developed method was to determine the number of potential customers (respondents) needed to provide product requirements, which were then processed and used to predict the quality level of the product. This method was applied to simultaneously test a number of hypotheses, determine the test power, and detect statistically significant differences for several relationships of the sample sizes and the test power. This was achieved using universal hypotheses and the popular alternative-punctual (MAP) method. Testing of the proposed method showed that it was able to predict the quality level of products based on current expectations of customers.