Research paper

Research Paper

CMBA 610

Steps in the Research Process

1. Select a topic. This should be a question that you find interesting and personally or professionally meaningful.

2. Conduct a literature review. Consult the professional or academic literature to find out what previous researchers have already learned about the topic you’re going to research.

3. State your hypothesis.

4. Develop your research model.

5. Collect data

6. Analyze data

7. Draw conclusions

Select a Topic

• Can be related to your industry or your business, but it doesn’t have to be.

• Theory propose, data dispose

• Take into account time and resource constraints.

• Embedded within your research topic is a causal relationship that you are going to explore/test. • For example, suppose you want to study profitability. You may ask:

• What causes profitability?

or

• What does profitability cause?

Conduct a Literature Review

• Go to library homepage and search your topic. Narrow your search to articles only.

• For this assignment, I do NOT want you to restrict your sources to peer-reviewed journals. You should have at two articles, one of which may be non-peer-reviewed.

• Include articles with divergent points of view.

• Summarize the “literature” you reviewed, paying attention to data sources, variables used, methodology employed, and conclusions reached. Be sure to draw out points of agreement and disagreement.

State Your Hypothesis

• At this stage, you are going to make explicit the hypothesis that you are going to test. At this early point in the process, simply state whether you believe that dependent variable Y and independent variable X are positively or negatively related to one another. By labeling one variable Y and the other X, you are implicitly assuming a causal relationship and a direction of causality.

• More on this later.

Develop Your Research Model

• We are going to use multivariate regression analysis to test your research hypothesis (much more on this later). For simplicity, we will assume that the relationship between Y and X is linear and stable over time, and can be written as:

Y = α + βX

• Since there are almost certainly multiple determinants of Y, we will include these other variables by writing:

Y = α + β1X1 + β2X2 + … + βnXn

Collect Data

• Having identified our research model as:

Y = α + β1X1 + β2X2 + … + βnXn we need to collect data for Y and all the Xs in the model.

• Pet Peeve: “data” is plural. Compare with “datum,” which is singular and refers to a single data point.

Data indicate, not data indicates.

• Data should be collected from reliable sources, generally government but also, potentially, university and industry sources.

Analyze Data

• We’ll be discussing data analysis over the next few weeks.

Draw Conclusions

• Conclusions must follow from the analysis you conducted. You can’t discover something but conclude something else because what you discovered is inconsistent with your expectations, your political views, or what your boss wants.

• There is a strong ethical dimension that runs through the entire research process, from data collection to analysis to conclusion. Research is a search for truth. Distorting results is both unethical and, in the long-run, counterproductive.