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2. Explain how research would help a manager to make better business decisions.
• Business research is designed to facilitate the managerial decision-making process for
all aspects of the business: finance, marketing, human resources, and so on.
• Business research is an essential tool for management in virtually all problem-solving
and decision-making activities.
• By providing the necessary information on which to base business decisions, research
can decrease the risk of making a wrong decision in each area. However, it is important
to note that research is an aid to managerial decision making, never a substitute for it.
3. Do managers always need to conduct research to make business decisions? State the
criteria for deciding whether to conduct a business research or not.
• The need to make intelligent, informed decisions ultimately motivates an organization to
engage in business research. Not every decision requires research. Thus, when confronting
a key decision, a manager must initially decide whether or not to conduct business research.
• The determination of the need for research centers on
• Time constraints,
• The availability of data,
• The nature of the decision to be made,
• The value of the research information in relation to costs.
4. Describe the process of scientific research.
The scientific method is the way researchers go about using knowledge and evidence to
reach objective conclusions about the real world.
The scientific method is the same in social sciences, such as business, as in physical
sciences, such as physics. In this case, it is the way we come to understand business
phenomena.
5. What is review of literature? Why is it done?
• A literature review surveys books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to
a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description,
summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem
being investigated.
• Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored
while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your
research fits within a larger field of study.
The purpose of a literature review is to:
• Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem
being studied.
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].
5. List and briefly illustrate the four scales of measurement in statistics / data analytics.
There are four measurement scales (or types of data): nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio.
•Nominal scales are used for labeling variables, without
any quantitative value. “Nominal” scales could simply be called “labels.” Here are
some examples, below. Notice that all of these scales are mutually exclusive (no
overlap) and none of them have any numerical significance
• Ordinal scales, the order of the values is what’s important and significant, but the
differences between each one is not really known. Ordinal scales are typically measures
of non-numeric concepts like satisfaction, happiness, discomfort, etc.
• Interval scales are numeric scales in which we know both the order and the exact
differences between the values. The classic example of an interval scale
is Celsius temperature because the difference between each value is the same. For
example, the difference between 60 and 50 degrees is a measurable 10 degrees, as is
the difference between 80 and 70 degrees.
• Ratio scales provide a wealth of possibilities when it comes to statistical analysis.
These variables can be meaningfully added, subtracted, multiplied, divided (ratios).
Central tendency can be measured by mode, median, or mean; measures of dispersion,
such as standard deviation and coefficient of variation can also be calculated from ratio
scales
6. What are primary and secondary data? How are they useful in research?
• Primary Data:
• These are the data which are collected from some primary sources i.e., a source
of origin where the data generate. These are collected for the first time by an
investigator or an agency for any statistical analysis. “Data which are gathered
originally for a certain purpose are known as primary data.” — Horace Secris.
• Secondary data: which are gathered and recorded by someone else prior to
(and for purposes other than) the current project. Secondary data usually are
historical and already assembled. They require no access to respondents or
subjects.
• Often research entails asking people—called respondents—to provide answers to
written or spoken questions. These interviews or questionnaires collect data
through the mail, on the telephone, online, or face-to-face
• Secondary data are essential in instances when data cannot be obtained using
primary data collection procedures. For example, a manufacturer of farm
implements could not duplicate the information in the Census of Agriculture
because much of the information there (for example, amount of taxes paid) might
not be accessible to a private firm.
7. What is the difference between a questionnaire and an interview schedule? Explain their
relevance to research.
8. What is focus group discussion and why it is undertaken?
• A focus group could be defined as a group of interacting individuals having some
common interest or characteristics, brought together by a moderator, who uses the
group and its interaction as a way to gain information about a specific or focused
issue.
• A focus group is typically 7-10 people who are unfamiliar with each other. These
participants are selected because they have certain characteristics in common that
relate to the topic of the focus group.
• The moderator or interviewer creates a permissive and nurturing environment that
encourages different perceptions and points of view, without pressuring
participants to vote, plan or reach consensus (Krueger, 1988).
• The group discussion is conducted several times with similar types of participants
to identify trends and patterns in perceptions. Careful and systematic analysis of the
discussions provide clues and insights as to how a product, service, or opportunity
is perceived by the group.
Inferential statistics:
• Inferential statistics use a random sample of data taken from a population to describe and
make inferences about the population. Inferential statistics are valuable when examination
of each member of an entire population is not convenient or possible.
• For example, to measure the diameter of each nail that is manufactured in a mill is
impractical. You can measure the diameters of a representative random sample of nails.
You can use the information from the sample to make generalizations about the diameters
of all of the nails.
• Eg: In a study to determine whether how long a student sleeps affects test scores, the
independent variable is length of time spent sleeping while the dependent variable is the
test score.
• Purposeful data integration enables researchers to seek a more panoramic view of their
research landscape, viewing phenomena from different viewpoints and through diverse
research lenses.
o Research that addresses business objectives through techniques that allow the
researcher to pro- vide elaborate interpretations of phenomena without depending
on numerical measurement; its focus is on discovering true inner meanings and new
insights.
• Researchers serve clients or, put another way, the doers of research serve the users.
It is often easy for a doer to compromise professional standards in an effort to please
the user. After all, the user pays the bills.
• Given the large number of ethical dilemmas involved in research, ethics is highly
applicable to business research.
• Snowball sampling is the process of selecting a sample using networks. To start with,
a few individuals in a group or organization are selected and the required information
is collected from them.
• They are then asked to identify other people in the group or organization, and the people
selected by them become a part of the sample.
• Information is collected from them, and then these people are asked to identify other
members of the group and, in turn, those identified become the basis of further data
collection .
• This process is continued until the required number or a saturation point has been
reached, in terms of the information being sought.
1.
26) Defining a research problem
• One of the first tasks, therefore, on the way to deciding on the detailed topic of
research is to find a question, an unresolved controversy, a gap in knowledge or an
unrequited need within the chosen subject.
• This search requires an awareness of current issues in the subject and an inquisitive
and questioning mind
• . So what features should you look for which could lead you to a suitable research
problem? 1) It should be of great interest to you
• 2) the problem should be significant
• 3) It should be delineated
• 4) You should be able to obtain the information required
• 5) You should be able to draw conclusions related to the problem
• 6) You should be able to state it clearly and concisely
27) Variables, types/categories (independent, dependent, extraneous / influencing /
intervening) examples
• Variable is anything that varies or changes from one instance to another. Variables can
exhibit differences in value, usually in magnitude or strength, or in direction. In research,
a variable is either observed or manipulated, in which case it is an experimental variable.
• Continuous variable is one that can take on a range of values that correspond to some
quantitative amount .A categorical variable is one that indicates membership in some
group. The term classificatory variable is sometimes also used and is generally
interchangeable with categorical variable
• Dependent variable is a process outcome or a variable that is predicted and/or explained
by other variables. An independent variable is a variable that is expected to influence the
dependent variable in some way.
• That is another way of saying that dependent variables do not change independent
variables.
• Extraneous variable: Variables that naturally exist in the environment that may have
some systematic effect on the dependent variable
• Intervening variables: link the independent and dependent variables. In certain
situations the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable does not
eventuate till the Intervention of another variable – the intervening variable. The cause
variable will have the assumed effect only in the presence of an intervening variable.
28)
• In the diagnostic research design, a researcher is inclined towards evaluating the root
cause of a specific topic.
• Elements that contribute towards a troublesome situation are evaluated in this research
design method.
• There are three parts of diagnostic research design:
• Peer review
• Blind review
2) Presentations at conferences
4) Books.
• Data analytics (DA) is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions
about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialized systems and
software.
• Data analytics technologies and techniques are widely used in commercial industries to
enable organizations to make more-informed business decisions and by scientists and
researchers to verify or disprove scientific models, theories and hypotheses.
DATA ANALYSIS:
• Data analysis is the application of reasoning to understand the data that have been
gathered. In its simplest form, analysis may involve determining consistent patterns and
summarizing the relevant details revealed in the investigation.
• The appropriate analytical technique for data analysis will be determined by
management’s information requirements, the characteristics of the research design, and
the nature of the data gathered.
• Statistical analysis may range from portraying a simple frequency distribution to more
complex multivariate analyses approaches, such as multiple regression.
54) Spss:
• SPSS is short for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and it’s used by various
kinds of researchers for complex statistical data analysis.
• The SPSS software package was created for the management and statistical analysis of
social science data. It was originally launched in 1968 by SPSS Inc., and was later
acquired by IBM in 2009.