business research methods chap003
TRANSCRIPT
3-1
3-2McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights
Reserved.
Part OneINTRODUCTION TO
BUSINESS RESEARCH
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Chapter ThreeTHE RESEARCH PROCESS
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The Management-ResearchQuestion Hierarchy
Management Dilemma
Measurement QuestionsInvestigative
Questions
Research Questions
Management Questions
Management Decision
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Working with the Hierarchy
• Management Dilemma
– The symptom of an actual problem– Not difficult to identify a dilemma,
however choosing one to focus on may be difficult
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Working with the Hierarchy
• Management Question Categories
– Choice of purposes or objective
– Generation and evaluation of solutions
– Troubleshooting or control situation
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Working with the Hierarchy
• Fine tune the research question– Examine concepts and constructs – Break research questions into specific
second-and-third-level questions– Verify hypotheses with quality tests– Determine what evidence answers the
various questions and hypothesis– Set the scope of your study
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Working with the Hierarchy
• Investigative Questions
– Questions the researcher must answer to satisfactorily arrive at a conclusion about the research question
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Working with the Hierarchy
• Measurement Questions
– The questions we actually ask or extract from respondents
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Other Processes in the Hierarchy
• Exploration– Recent developments– Predictions by informed figures about
the prospects of the technology– Identification of those involved in the
area– Accounts of successful ventures and
failures by others in the field
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Research Process Problems
• The Favored Technique Syndrome
• Company Database Strip-Mining
• Unresearchable Questions
• Ill-Defined Management Problems
• Politically Motivated Research
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Designing the Study
• Select a research design from the large variety of methods, techniques, procedures, protocols, and sampling plans
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Resource Allocation & Budgets
• Guides to plan a budget– Project planning– Data gathering– Analysis, interpretation, and reporting
• Types of budgeting– Rule-of-thumb– Departmental or functional area– Task
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Evaluation Methods
• Ex Post Facto Evaluation
• Prior Evaluation
• Option Analysis
• Decision Theory
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Contents of a Research Proposal
• Statement of the research question
• Brief description of research methodology
• Pilot Testing
• Data collection
• Data preparation
• Data analysis and interpretation
• Research reporting
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Data Collection
• Characterized by– abstractness– verifiability– elusiveness– closeness to the phenomenon
• Types– Secondary data– Primary data
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Final Steps in Research
• Data analysis
• Reporting the results
– Executive summary
– Overview of the research
– Implementation strategies for the recommendations
– Technical appendix