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When businesses face significant issues that can harm them considerably whether in the areas of sales, profits, employees or even legalities, they often opt to business research. When business research provides them the desired information regarding the issues which company is facing; those reports are based on different designs of research or maybe the combination. For instance, Qualitative and Quantitative are two form of research designs which researchers use to provide various facts. Each has its benefits, and if they are combined, a valid and convincing report can be created which in this case, Team B used for their business research on Samsung; they used a combination of both qualitative and quantitative research.

The primary design of Team B’s business research on Samsung is quantitative. “Quantitative research attempts precise measurement of something. In business research, quantitative methodologies usually measure consumer behavior, knowledge, opinions, or attitudes.” (Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 146). Quantitative research design focuses on questions such as how many, how much, generally dealing with numbers or percentages. Team B chose quantitative research to be their primary method, even though the qualitative method was also used. Team B wanted to reflect on data that showed how many or what percentage of Samsung customers decided to switch to their competitors’ products due to the product related issues. They also wanted to provide information that whether or Samsung had any decrease in their sales or profits. A good example of such data is as mentioned in the article, “It said revenue likely dropped to 48 trillion won, down 8.4% from the same period last year.” (Cheng & Lee, 2015).

Team B’s research concluded that Samsung lost many of its customers and sales due to the product related issues with their recent launch of Galaxy S6 series and how S6 lacks features that were included in the previous Samsung models such as removable battery and storage card slot. To validate this point, Team B used a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. According to Forbes, “What makes the Galaxy S6 so much more impractical? The loss of expandable storage, the removable battery and water resistance.” (Kelly, 2015).  Similarly, according to International Business Times, “While it’s possible for Samsung to make phones that can be better than iPhones on the hardware front, it hasn’t been able to match the ecosystem of software and support with Apple’s products, he added.” (Villapaz, 2015). That is qualitative data which is further backed up by the quantitative data gathered from Wall Street Journal and mentioned in the article, “Samsung still holds the lead for overall handsets sold globally. But not necessarily profits. That title belongs to Apple, which recorded 92% of global smartphone profits in the first quarter of 2015.” (Villapaz, 2015).

Relying solely on one research design whether qualitative or quantitative may not provide the business with sufficient information or research itself may be a bias. “Qualitative research includes an array of interpretive techniques that seek to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency, of certain more or less naturally occurring phenomena in the social world.” (Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 144). Qualitative research method may include detailed interviews that may be tied with emotions or based on an individual’s personal experience but if a researcher does not validate that information with legitimate quantitative data then the research can be vague or bias. When both designs are combined to use in the research, it not only provides a significant convincing data but also strengthens the research. As mentioned in the book, “Many researchers recognize that qualitative research compensates for the weaknesses of quantitative research and vice versa; these forward thinkers believe that the methodologies complement rather than rival each other.” (Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 167).

There is an abundance of data and research available online, in the articles, in case studies but what makes these research valid and unbiased is how the data is collected and what efforts have been put in to produce the research to the businesses so they can make informed decisions. Using a combination of research designs of qualitative and quantitative strengthens the research and provide convincing data regarding the various issues that companies are facing. In this case, Team B has chosen to use primarily quantitative data but also have managed to collect qualitative research to strengthen their research.