Research Methods for BITE

Monday 27th April 2009

Dr Steve Jewell

Programme
1130 – 1300

What is a good topic?

The research proposal template
How a research proposal is judged
A grade form

1400 – 1530

Setting research objectives

The research perspective
Research design

1545 – 1700

Sampling
Data collection

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Characteristics of a good topic

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Research Proposal Template
Please note that blue instructions (in italics) should be deleted and replaced by the
appropriate entries. The word guides are a maximum – the total word count is 2500-3500.
The proposal should include a list of references and a timeframe.

1. Title
Give a clear and succinct title, indicating the problem area around which the research will be
undertaken.

2. Background
Include a description of the background to your topic.
Explain why you have chosen the topic - give both business and personal reasons.

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Word Guide
Introduction and Business Reasons 325
Personal Reasons 75

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3. Preliminary Review of the Literature
Give a brief critical review of the literature that you have read in writing the proposal. Don’t
forget to give a list of sources used (a minimum of 6) - use the Harvard Referencing system.
Have you a conceptual framework? If so, include.
Justify the need for the research.

Word Guide 1000

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4. Research Questions and Objectives
Here you should write your research questions as they emerge from the background and
critical literature review. Develop these into 3-5 specific research objectives that begin with
to… and use higher level verbs.

Word Guide 200

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5. Research Plan
This is the most important section.

A clear description of the three phases of the Research Plan is required:

Perspective
Design and
Data Collection Methods

What is the access and sampling strategy (including sample numbers)?

How will the data be analysed and presented?

What are the limitations of your research?

Comment briefly on validity, reliability and generalisability.

Word Guide 1000

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6. Ethical Considerations
What we are looking for here is a discussion of any ethical issues raised by your particular
proposal and how you propose to handle them. You will need to acknowledge and follow the
BES Ethical Approval Process.

How will you avoid plagiarism?

Word Guide 250

7 Timetable and any special resources required

Include a Gantt chart.
Alert us to any particular problems you are likely to face.

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Word Guide 150

Evaluating Management Research

So what is special about research in a management environment and how
might we make defensible decisions concerning how to conduct it? Assuming
that the research is original and has relevance, there are four key criteria to
bear in mind.

Validity

Validity is arguably the most important criterion – is the research question

being addressed? It asks whether we are really measuring what we intend to
measure. It requires accuracy from you as the researcher in identifying the
phenomena under investigation and identifying which measurements get to
the heart of the matter. For example, if we were to use students' ratings of
how "happy" they were with the MBA course as our only measure of its overall
quality, there would be room to question the validity of the measure, however
gratifying or otherwise the results. Some students might just be coming along
for the ride or to get an MBA by the quickest means possible; they could
easily prefer an undemanding course that did not stretch them. A whole
range of other measures would be needed in addition including ratings by
past students, external examiners’ reports, internal quality control
mechanisms, content analysis of the course, expert assessment of its
usefulness, and its impact on the careers of its students. And even then we
would end up with a profile, not a single judgement.

Reliability

Research is reliable if it is conducted in a way that allows other researchers to

replicate the results. Perhaps the easiest way of understanding reliability is to
look at it in the narrow context of a question in a survey. A question is said to
be reliable if it produces the same results whenever it is used. For example a
question asked of MBA students as to how they liked the course could
produce quite different results if asked on a Saturday night during a residential
or straight after a finance examination.

However, reliability can be looked at in the context of an entire piece of

research. The key question is the extent to which the results derived are
dependent on the particular circumstances of the research. Often reliability is
a matter for judgement since it may not be possible or desirable to repeat the
work to find out if it reliable or not. One obvious reason for this is that
management research occurs in real time and space and life moves on.

Generalisability (or external validity)

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Generalisabilty is the extent to which research findings can be applied to
another context. It certainly needs to be addressed in all research, and how
you handle its issues will be one criterion on which your dissertation is judged.
In positivist research your ability to generalise is a function of the tight control
of variables within the experimental design. Laws will hold for other
circumstances where the same configuration of variables recurs.

Case study research, on the other hand, distinguishes between

generalizations within a case and generalisations from the "instance" of a
case to the "class" of instances from which the case was drawn.
Generalisations from an instance to a class are best asserted tentatively,
although cumulative case studies make the propositions stronger. This
cautious approach would be quite reasonable in an MBA dissertation.

The secret of all good research is to design it so the ability to generalize is

maximized. However, care must be taken to resist the temptation to claim too
much.

Transparency

Your tutors, other researchers, and anyone who reads the results of your
research are entitled to see how the work has been carried out and the
relationship between the data and conclusions. You need to allow others to
see what you have done, why you have done it and how the data analysis
leads to your conclusions. This is transparency.

Aspects of Validity

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Research Perspectives
Research is a complex process, rooted in philosophy in terms of what is there to
know and how do we go about knowing it. It has a language that is intimidating to
novice researchers. Although you are not expected to fully understand this
language, you are required to appreciate three perspectives.

Let us look at the first perspective. Until relatively recent times the scientific
approach was the predominant one. The natural sciences ruled - if a phenomenon
could not be measured accurately and the variables controlled then it was not worth
investigating. This is known as the positivist approach to research. It is based on
the experiment and the desire to establish causality between variables.

In the last century the social sciences were born. It was acknowledged that people
do not behave like materials. Individually we try to make sense of the world through
our experiences. The researcher seeks to understand the different worlds that
people “inhabit”. This is known as the interpretivist approach. This approach is
elegantly expresses by the renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz “man is an
animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be
these webs, and the analysis of it is not to be an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”.

Although we each have our own world, there is a school of thought that we share
concept perceptions, cultures and beliefs. This is known as the realist approach. If
social theory is aimed at understanding society and changing it for the better, then
there must be some common understandings of the nature of the world? If there is
no degree of unambiguous reality, then there is little point to research.

Business and management research is a science and an art, and as such falls
somewhere between the extremes of the positivist and interpretivist approaches.

There are a number of ways of expressing the extremes of this continuum;

Quantitative qualitative
Objective subjective
Law meaning
Number word
Facts feelings
Detached involved
Logic intuition

More often than not it is polarised simply into quantitative versus qualitative
research. There have been endless debates about the relative merits of the two
approaches – many unhelpful. The secret is to ask “What approach will give us the
answer to our question?” In business and management research it is more often
than not a combination of the two.

The second and associated perspective is to do with the nature of knowledge and in
particular how it is acquired – data collection methods. Each discipline has its
preferred method – the chemist favours the experiment, the historian archives, the

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geographer the field trip, and the anthropologist observation. Management draws on
a number of disciplines, the researcher uses a combination of interviews,
questionnaires, observation and documentation to ensure the research question is
validly answered.

The final perspective is whether the research is theory testing or theory forming.
Theory testing is known as the deductive approach where a proposition is made
which is then tested for its truth. Theory forming is known as the inductive approach.
Data is gathered and a theory developed to rationalise the data.

The deductive approach is normally associated with positivism and the inductive
approach with interpretivism. However, pure forms of the two approaches really
exist and overly dwelling on the distinction is unhelpful. We come back to asking
ourselves “What approach will give us the answer to our question?” However, a
warning: induction is more difficult than deduction.

For further understanding in this area read Chapter 4 of Saunders et al (2007). But
do not worry if it confuses you!
Steve Jewell
December 2006

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Research Designs

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Data Collection
Sampling

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Slide 7.12

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Slide 7.13

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Data Collection

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