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Part One
INTRODUCTION TO
BUSINESS RESEARCH

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McGraw-Hill/Irwin

2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights

Chapter Three
THE RESEARCH PROCESS

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The Management-Research
Question Hierarchy
6

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Management
Decision
Measurement

Questions
Investigative
QuestionsQuestions
Management

Research
Questions
Management Dilemma

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

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The Favored Technique Syndrome

Company Database Strip-Mining
Unresearchable Questions
Ill-Defined Management Problems
Politically Motivated Research

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

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Statement of the research question

Brief description of research methodology
Pilot Testing
Data collection
Data preparation
Data analysis and interpretation
Research reporting

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
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