Chapter 04The Research Process
CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students should understand…
1.
Research is decision and dilemma centered.
2.
The clarified research question is the result of careful exploration and analysis,
and sets the direction for the research project.
3.
How budgeting and value assessments influence the process for proposing
research and, ultimately, research design.
4.
What is included in research design, data collection, data analysis, and reporting.
5. Research process problems to solve.
CHAPTER LECTURE NOTES
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
STAGE 1: CLARIFYING THE RESEARCH QUESTION
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The management-research question hierarchy process of sequential question
formulation leads a manager or researcher from management dilemma to
investigative questions.
The process begins with the management dilemma—the problem or opportunity
that requires a business decision.
The management dilemma is usually a symptom of an actual problem, such as:
 Rising costs.
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The discovery of an expensive chemical compound that would increase the
efficacy of a drug.
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Increasing tenant move-outs from an apartment complex.
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Declining sales.
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A larger number of product defects during the manufacture of an automobile.
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An increasing number of letters and phone complaints about postpurchase
service
The management dilemma can also be triggered by an early signal of an
opportunity or growing evidence that a fad may be gaining staying power.
 Identifying management dilemmas is rarely difficult.
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Choosing one dilemma on which to focus may be difficult.
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Choosing incorrectly may result in a waste of time and resources.
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Experienced managers claim that practice makes perfect in this area.
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New managers may wish to develop several management-research question
hierarchies, each starting with a different management dilemma.
Subsequent stages of the hierarchy take the marketer and his or her research
collaborator through various brainstorming and exploratory research exercises to
define the following:
 Management question—the management dilemma restated in question format.
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Research question(s)—the hypothesis that best states the objective of the
research; the question(s) that focuses the researcher’s attention.
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Investigative questions—questions the researcher must answer to
satisfactorily answer the research question; what the marketer feels he or she
needs to know to arrive at a conclusion about the management dilemma.
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Management questions—the questions asked of the participants or the
observations that must be recorded.
The definition of the management question sets the research task.
STAGE 2: PROPOSING RESEARCH
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Exhibit 4-3 summarizes the research proposal process.
Resource Allocation and Budgets.
Once the research question is defined, the manager must propose research in order
to allocate resources to the project.
A guide might be that (a) project planning, (b) data gathering, and (c) analysis,
interpretation, and reporting each share about equally in the budget.
Without budgetary approval, many research efforts are rejected for lack of
resources.
Types of budgets in organizations where research is purchased and cost
containment is crucial include:
 Rule-of-thumb budgeting—taking a fixed percentage of some criterion.
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Departmental or functional-area budgeting—allocates a portion of total
expenditures in the unit to research activities.
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Task budgeting—selects specific research projects to support on an ad hoc
basis.
Valuing Research Information.
 There is a great deal of interplay between budgeting and value assessment in any
management decision to conduct research.
 In profit-making concerns, business managers are increasingly faced with proving
that the research they initiate or purchase meets return-on-investment (ROI)
objectives.
 Conceptually, the value of business research is not difficult to determine.
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Whether research is conducted by for-profit or not-for-profit organizations, the
value of the research decision with research—however it is measured—must
exceed the value of the decision without research.
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Evaluation Methods
Ex Post Facto Evaluation.
 If there is any measurement of the value of research, it is usually an after-the-fact
event.
 While the postresearch effort at cost-benefit comes too late to guide a current
research decision, such analysis may sharpen the manager’s ability to make
judgments about future research proposals.
Prior or Interim Evaluation.
 Some research projects are sufficiently unique that managerial experience
provides little aid in evaluating the research proposal.
Option Analysis.
 Managers can conduct a formal analysis with each alternative research project
judged in terms of estimated costs and associated benefits and with managerial
judgment playing a major role.
 The critical task is to quantify the benefits from the research.
 Estimates of benefits are crude and largely reflect an orderly way to estimate
outcomes under uncertain conditions.
Decision Theory.
 When there are alternatives from which to choose, a rational way to approach the
decision is to try to assess the outcomes of each action.
 Consider two possible actions (alternatives) as A1 and A2.
 The manager chooses the action that affords the best outcome—the action
choice that meets or exceeds whatever criteria are established for judging
alternatives.
 Each criterion is a combination of a decision rule (criterion for judging the
attractiveness of two or more alternatives when using a decision variable) and a
decision variable (a quantifiable characteristic, attribute, or outcome on which a
choice decision will be made).
 The alternative selected (A1 and A2) depends on the decision variable chosen and
the decision rule used.
 The evaluation of alternatives requires that:
 Each alternative is explicitly stated.
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A decision variable is defined by an outcome that may be measured.
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A decision rule is determined by which outcomes may be compared.
The Research Proposal.
 A written proposal is often required when a study is being suggested.
 This is especially true if an outside research supplier will be contracted to
conduct the research.
 A research proposal may be oral.
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STAGE 3: DESIGNING THE RESEARCH PROJECT.
Research Design.
 The research design is the blueprint for fulfilling objectives and providing the
insight to answer management’s dilemma.
 The field of business research offers a large variety of methods, techniques,
procedures, and protocols.
 The numerous alternatives and combinations spawned by the abundance of
tools may be used to construct alternative perspectives on the same problem.
Sampling Design.
 Another step in planning the research project is to identify the target population
(those people, events, or records that have the desired information and can answer
the measurement questions) and then determine whether a sample or a census is
desired.
 Who and how many people will be interviewed?
 What events will be observed, and how?
 Which, and how many, records will be inspected?
 A census is a count of all elements in a population.
 A sample is a group of cases, participants, events, or records constituting a
portion of the target population, carefully selected to represent that population.
 Probability sampling (every person within the target population get a nonzero
chance of selection) and nonprobability sampling may be used to construct the
sample.
Pilot testing.
 The last step in a research design is often a pilot test.
 To condense the project time frame, this step can be skipped.
 A pilot test is conducted to detect weaknesses in research methodology and the
data collection instrument, as well as provide proxy data for selection of a
probability sample.
 The pilot test should approximate the anticipated actual research situation
(test) as closely as possible.
 A pilot test may have from 25 to 100 subjects and these subjects do not have
to be statistically selected.
 Pilot testing has saved countless survey studies from disaster by using the
suggestions of the participants to identify and change confusing, awkward, or
offensive questions and techniques.
STAGE 4: DATA COLLECTION AND PREPARATION.
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The gathering of data includes a variety of data gathering alternatives.
 Questionnaires, standardized tests, and observational forms (called checklists)
are among the devices used to record raw data.
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What are data?
– Data can be the facts presented to the researcher from the study’s
environment.
– Data can be characterized by their abstractness, verifiability, elusiveness,
and closeness to phenomenon.
Data, as abstractions, are more metaphorical than real.
Data are processed by our senses.
Capturing data is elusive.
Data reflect their truthfulness by closeness to the phenomena.
– Secondary data are data originally collected to address a problem other
than the one which requires the manager’s attention at the moment.
– Primary data are data the researcher collects to address the specific
problem at hand—the research question.
– Data are the information collected from participants, by observation, or
from secondary sources.
– Data are edited to ensure consistency across respondents and to locate
omissions.
– In the case of a survey, editing reduces errors in the recording, improves
legibility, and clarifies unclear and inappropriate responses.
– Coding is used to reduce the responses to a more manageable system for
processing and storage.
STAGE 5: DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION.
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Managers need information and insights, not raw data, to make appropriate
business decisions.
 Researchers generate information and insights by analyzing data after its
collection.
 Data analysis is the editing, reducing, summarizing, looking for patterns, and
applying statistical techniques to data.
 Increasingly, managers are asking research specialists to make
recommendations based on their interpretation of the data.
STAGE 6: REPORTING THE RESULTS.
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As the business research process draws to a close it is necessary to prepare a
report and transmit the findings, insights, and recommendations to the manager
for the intended purpose of decision making.
 The researcher adjusts the style and organization of the report according to the
target audience, the occasion, and the purpose of the research.
– The report should be manager-friendly and avoid technical jargon.
– Reports should be developed from the manager’s or information user’s
perspective.
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The researcher must accurately assess the manager’s needs throughout the
research process and incorporate this understanding into the final product, the
research report.
 To avoid having the research report shelved with no action taken, the
researcher should strive for:
– Insightful adaptation of the information to the client’s needs.
– Careful choice of words in crafting interpretations, conclusions, and
recommendations.
When research is contracted to an outside supplier, managers and researchers
increasingly collaborate to develop appropriate reporting of project results and
information.
At a minimum, a research report should contain:
– An executive summary consisting of a synopsis of the problem, findings,
and recommendations.
– An overview of the research: the problem’s background, a summary of
exploratory findings drawn from secondary data sources, the actual
research design and procedures, and conclusions.
– A section on implementation strategies for the recommendations.
– A technical appendix with all the materials necessary to replicate the
project.
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RESEARCH PROCESS ISSUES
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Studies can wander off target or be less effective than they should be for a
multitude of reasons.
The Favored-Technique Syndrome
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Some researchers are method-bound; they recast the management question so that
it is amenable to their favorite methodology.
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Persons knowledgeable about, and skilled in, some techniques, but not others, are
often blinded by their special competencies.
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The manager sponsoring the research is responsible for spotting an inappropriate
technique-driven research proposal.
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Since the advent of total quality management (TQM), many standardized
customer satisfaction questionnaires have been developed.
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Managers must not let researchers steamroll them into use of an instrument, even
if it was successful for another client.
Company Database Strip-Mining
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Managers may mistakenly believe that a pool of information or a database reduces
(or eliminates) the need for further research.
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Managers frequently hear from superiors, “We should use the information we
already have before collecting more.”
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Having a massive amount of information is not the same as having
knowledge.
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Each field in a database was created for a specific reason, which may or may
not be compatible with the management question facing the organization.
MindWriter example:
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Jason and Myra can accumulate facts concerning the service.
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Each service problem can be tied to a particular laptop model.
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Each problem can be matched to the name and address of an owner.
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But, they still aren’t likely to know how a particular owner uses the laptop or
how satisfied he/she was with MindWriter’s service policies and practices.
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Mining management information databases, but it will rarely answer all
management questions related to a particular management dilemma.
Unresearchable Questions
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Not all management questions are researchable, and not all research questions are
answerable.
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To be researchable, a question must be one for which observable or other data
collection can provide the answer.
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Many questions cannot be answered on the basis of information alone.
Questions of value and policy often factor into management decisions.
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Example: In the MetalWorks study, management may be asking, “Should we
hold out for a liberalization of the seniority rules in our new labor
negotiations?”
Additional considerations, such as “fairness to workers” or
“management’s right to manage” may be important to the decision.
 Questions of value can often be transformed into questions of fact.
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Example: As it related to worker fairness, it may be able to estimate the
extent to which workers will be affected by a rule change. Then, one could
gather worker opinions about the fairness of seniority rules.
– Even if a question can be answered by facts alone, it might not be
researchable because currently accepted and tested procedures or
techniques are inadequate.
Ill-Defined Management Problems
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Some problems are so complex, value-laden, and bound by constraints that they
are intractable to traditional forms of analysis.
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Ill-defined research questions may have too many interrelate facets to be
measured accurately.
– Methods may not presently exist to handle questions of this type.
– Even if such methods were invented, they might not produce the data
necessary to solve such problems.
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Novice researchers should avoid ill-defined problems.
Politically Motivated Research
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A manager’s motivation for seeking research may not always be obvious.
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Hidden agendas may include:
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Presence of research may help win approval for pet idea.
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Authorizing research is a measure of personal protection for decision maker.
In these situations, it may be harder to win the manager’s support for an
appropriate research design.
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