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Business ProjectNicos Rodosthenous PhD

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 1. Introduction• The aim of this chapter is to:• Outline the key assumptions of the positivist,

interpretivist and realist research philosophies• Distinguish between two main approaches to

research: deductive and inductive• Explain the benefits of adopting a multi-method

approach to the conduct of research• Understand some of the main ethical issues implied

by the choice of research strategy.22/10/2013

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 2. Differing approaches to research• It is concerned with the way in which you

collect data to answer your research question.• You begin your research i.e. to administer a

questionnaire or to conduct interviews.• Answers on this question belong in the center

of the research “onion”. (Figure 4.1) • 1) The first of these layers raises the question of

the research philosophy you adopt.22/10/2013

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 2) Considers the subject of your research approach.• 3) Examine what we call the research strategy.• 4) Refers to the time horizons you apply to your

research.• 5) About data collection methods.• 2.1 Research philosophy• Depends on the way you think about the

development of knowledge and the way we go about doing research.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• There are 3 views for research process which have important part to play in business and management research:

• 1) Positivism • The researcher assumes the role of an objective analyst,

making interpretations about those data have been collected .

• The researcher is also independent and sees people as phenomena to be studied from outside, and neither affects nor is affected by the subject of the research. (Remenyi et al., 1998)

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 2.2 Interpretivism• The interpretive model sees people being studied

to provide their own explanation.• In this sense, people not only interact with their

environment, they also seek to make sense of it through their interpretation of events.

• 2.3 Realism• Realism is based on the belief that a reality exists

and is independent of human thoughts and beliefs.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• However, realism recognizes that people themselves are not objects to be studied in the style of natural science.

• 3. Choosing a research approach• This is whether your research should use the

deductive approach, in which you develop a theory and hypothesis and design a research strategy to test the hypothesis , or

• The deductive approach, in which you would collect and develop theory as a result of your data analysis.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy. Figure 4.2

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

3.1 Induction and deduction: refer to alternative approaches to explanation in research. Research involves finding out and explaining, what is happening, how and why? It also involves description and collecting of info.

3.2 Induction: building theory begin at point A, observation/description Proceed to point B, analysis Arrive at point C, explanation22/10/2013

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 3.3 Deduction : testing theory Begin at point C, with hypothesis Proceed to point A, observation/description,

collecting data to test the hypothesis Proceed to point B, analysis, to test the

hypothesis against the data. (Case study 1 : Tennis vs Golf)

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 4. The need for a clear research strategy. • Your research strategy will be a general plan of

how you will go about answering the research questions you have set.

• It will contain clear objectives, derived from research questions, specify the sources from which you intend to collect data and consider the constraints you will inevitably have, i.e. access to data, time, location and money, ethical issues.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• The justification should always based on your research questions and objectives.

• 4.1 The different research strategies• We must emphasize that these strategies should

not be thought of as being mutually exclusive, and should be as follows:

Experiment Survey Case study22/10/2013

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

Grounded theory Ethnography Action research Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies Exploratory, descriptive and explanatory studies. Experiment: is a classical form of research that

owes much to the natural sciences, although it features strongly in much social science research, particularly psychology.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

Survey: is usually associated with the deductive approach. They allow the collection of a large amount of data from a sizeable population in a highly economical way by using questionnaires.

Using a survey strategy should give you more control over the research process, with every day news bulletin or newspaper reports.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

Case study: has considerable ability to generate answers to the question ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’ and ‘how’.(same as survey)

Can be a very worthwhile way of exploring existing theory.

Can also enable you to challenge an existing theory and provide a source of new hypotheses.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

Grounded theory: is a ‘theory building’ of a combination of induction and deduction.

Here, theory is developed from data generated by a series of observations.

Ethnography: is a research strategy that is very time consuming and takes place over an extended time period.

Action research: is divided into 3 areas: 1) emphasizes the purpose of the research, 2) relates the involvement of researchers, i.e.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

academics and external consultants, 3) the results could have implications beyond the immediate project.

The strengths of an action research strategy are a focus upon change, the recognition that time needs to be devoted, the monitoring and evaluation and the involvement of employees.

Time horizons: an important question is: ‘do I want my research as one ‘snapshot’ taken at a particular time or do I want it to be more akin to a diary as a

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• representation of events over a given period?• The ‘snapshot’ approach is what we call here cross-

sectional while the ‘diary’ perspective we call longitudinal.

• For example, studying the change in manufacturing processes in a company over a period of a year, this would be longitudinal case study.

Explanatory, descriptive and explanatory studies There are 3 principal ways of conducting explanatory

research:

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

1) search of the literature, 2) talking to experts in the subject, 3) conducting focus group interviews.

Descriptive and explanatory research: A descriptive research shows a tourist

destination losing market share. Explanatory research would examine the

reasons, price movements or ineffective marketing.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

Practitioner-researcher: if you are a part-time student, or if you are undertaking research as part of your job, you will have exciting opportunities to pursue business and management research.

5. Using multi-methods It is quite usual for a single study to combine

quantitative and qualitative methods and to use primary and secondary data. ( religious tourism)

There are two major advantages using multi-methods in the same study.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 1) different methods can be used for different purposes in a study, i.e. interviews, in order to get a feel for the key issues before doing a questionnaire.

• 2) enables triangulation to take place and refers to the use of different data collection methods within one study.

• There is an inevitable relationship between the data collection method and the results you obtain. The results will be affected by the methods used.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• 6. The credibility of research findings• Reducing the possibility of getting the answer

wrong means that attention has to be paid to two factors on research design : reliability and validity.

• Reliability is the extent to which research findings would be the same if the research were to be repeated at a later date or with a different sample of subjects.

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• Validity is the extent to which the info collected by the researcher truly reflects the phenomenon being studied.

• 7. The ethics of research design• This has important implications for the negotiations

of access to people and organizations and the collection of data. (protection of personal data)

• Your research design needs to consider the extent to which you should collect data from a research population that is unaware of the fact they are

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Deciding on the research approach and choosing a research strategy

• the subject of research and so they have not consented.

• This usually happens with medical case research, where we need a lot of personal data and information.

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