Four Paradigms of IS Development Survey Design and Hypothesis Testing (Proposal) by Jie (Jennifer) Xu

Four Paradigms: Functionalism: developer-as-systems expert; Social Relativism:developer-as-systems- facilitator; Radical--Structuralism:Developer-as-labor- partisan; Neohumanism:developer-as-emancipator- or-social-therapist.

Functionalism: Developer-as- system-expert Social Relativism:developer- as-systems-facilitator Radical Structuralism: Developer-as- labor-partisan Neohumanism: developer-as- emancipator-or- social-therapist Subjective Objective Order Conflict

Y= β 1 F + β 2 S +β 3 R + β 4 N + ε where y = the indicator of the approach used; Dummy variables: F = indicator of Functionalism, F= 1 if one believes Functionalism, F=0 otherwise; R = indicator of Radical Structuralism, R = 1 if one believes Radical Structuralism, R=0 otherwise; S = indicator of Social Relativism, S=1 if one believes Social Relativism, S=0 otherwise; N= indicator of Neohumanism, N=1 if one believes Neohumanism, N=0 otherwise; ε = error term.

Assumptions (1) Survey takers are rational and answer questions honestly; (2) No autocorrelation; ( This assumption is reasonable since the survey deals with people at one time period ) (3) Heteroscidasticity is allowed. ( var(u) can varies with age, education level, sex, etc.)

Data Hypothetical Data: y F S R N

Estimation Approach: OLS ( without heteroscidasticity) WLS ( with heteroscidasticity)

Hypothesis Testing Use ---- F test to test the joint significance of the coefficients. (If the F value is greater then a critical value, we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there are more than one paradigms.) T test to test the significance of a specific coefficient.

Survey Design (1) Sample Selection Sample Size >= 30 Participator: managers IS developers

(2) Question Set a) Assumption Part These questions ask mainly about the assumptions that the survey taker may believe. These questions are grouped into 4 sets. Each set consists of equal number, say 5, of questions. Group 1--Functionalism; Group 2--Social Relativism; Group 3--Radial Structuralism; Group 4--Neohumanism. All the questions are yes/no questions. The survey taker is supposed to answer "yes" if he believes the assertion provided or "no" otherwise. A typical question may look like this: " The system developer play a neutral and objective role in system development. A. Yes B. No."

E.g. Assumption question set

For example, the number of "yes" that participator A gives for each set is given: Number of "Yes" Paradigm 5 Functionalism 2 Social Relativism 1 Radial Structuralism 0 Neohumanism The this participator uses paradigm of Functionalism and the values of the dummy variables (F,S,R,N) are set to 1, 0,0,0, respectively.

a) Application part Choice value of the indicator of paradigms A-Functionalism 1 B-Social Relativeism 2 C-Radical Structuralism 3 D-Neohumanism 4

Problems with Methodology (1) Data problem Sometimes it is hard to classify the survey takers just by the number of "yes". Suppose a participator has two 4's for set 2 and set 3 and 0 for the other two sets. Then we can not tell whether the person believes Social Relativism or Radical Structuralism. If we set both S and R to 1, then this may lead to multicollinearity. One alternative way is to allow some weights to each question and allow higher weigh to the question about the role of system developer, since the answer to this question is largely determines the paradigm people use.

(2) Sample problem The sample is mainly consists of developers and managers in mediate or large companies. Thus it may not be random. If most the survey takers are from the large companies which usually hold one specific paradigm, the result of the hypothesis test will tend to favor the null hypothesis.

(3) Survey design problem Questions provided cannot well describe the properties of these different paradigms. If the survey taker is not familiar with context of the empirical case provided in the application part, he/she may end up with an "wrong" choice. (For instance, if the UTOPIA example is given, and the survey taker are not familiar with the technique in typesetting and the relationship between editor and typesetter, he/she may have no idea about which approach to choose.)