Bus642 Business Research Methods & Tools

Discussion 1

Scientific Thinking

Reference this week’s lecture to develop a research question and a hypothesis for a hypothetical business problem of your choice. Explain the management dilemma, or the business problem that the research would attempt to solve. Your research question must relate to the business reason for the research. For example, “Why have sales of used cars been declining at a rate of 5% per month since July 2012 at Smith Motors?” is a valid research question because you can investigate it with research.

A hypothesis must state an “educated guess” about why you think something is happening; think about cause and effect. For example, “Sales are declining at Smith Motors due to road construction around our dealership” is a hypothesis because it offers a possible cause for the problem. “Sales are declining at Smith Motors” is not a hypothesis because it does not offer a possible cause for the problem.

Discussion 2

Scholarly Research

Using the University Library, find a scholarly business research article on a topic you may want to write about for your final paper.

Sample topics include, but are not limited to:

Manufacturing Quality/Cost Improvement

Service Quality Improvement

Systems Design

Accounts Receivable/Billing/Accounts Receivable Aging

Marketing/Advertising Issues

Sales of Goods

Investments

Product Safety

Workplace Safety

Labor Pools

Human Resources matters of broad concern

Population Studies

Read the scholarly article all the way through before you post.

In your post, provide 

The citation formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Writing Center (points will be deducted if APA formatting is incorrect).

The article’s research question.

The article’s hypothesis.

A brief description, in your own words, about how the article answered the research question and tested the hypothesis.

Your evaluation of how well the study answered the question and tested the hypothesis.

Use the Library Research Tips Tutorial to help you complete this assignment. The tutorial covers what scholarly sources are and how to find them, generating and using keywords, and searching in the best library databases for business research.

Class Text

Landrum, R. E. (2014). Research methods for business: Tools and applications. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.