2. Part One INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS RESEARCH
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
© 2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights Reserved.

3. Chapter Three THE RESEARCH PROCESS

4. The Management-Research Question Hierarchy
Management Dilemma
Measurement Questions
Investigative Questions
Research Questions
Management Questions
Management Decision 1 2 3 4 5 6

5. 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

6. Working with the Hierarchy
Management Question Categories
Choice of purposes or objective
Generation and evaluation of solutions
Troubleshooting or control situation

7. 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

8. Working with the Hierarchy
Investigative Questions
Questions the researcher must answer to satisfactorily arrive at a conclusion about the research question

9. Working with the Hierarchy
Measurement Questions
The questions we actually ask or extract from respondents

10. 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

11. Research Process Problems
The Favored Technique Syndrome
Company Database Strip-Mining
Unresearchable Questions
Ill-Defined Management Problems
Politically Motivated Research

12. Designing the Study
Select a research design from the large variety of methods, techniques, procedures, protocols, and sampling plans

13. 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

14. Evaluation Methods Ex Post Facto Evaluation Prior Evaluation
Option Analysis
Decision Theory

15. 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

16. Data Collection Characterized by Types abstractness verifiability
elusiveness
closeness to the phenomenon
Types
Secondary data
Primary data

17. Final Steps in Research
Data analysis
Reporting the results
Executive summary
Overview of the research
Implementation strategies for the recommendations
Technical appendix