Bus642 Business Research Methods & Tools

Week 1 Lecturer

Business Research Methods and Tools

Week 1: Introduction to business research, literature reviews, research questions, and hypotheses

Welcome to Week 1 of BUS642, Business Research Methods and Tools! We’ll start out slowly this week to make sure you understand the importance of research in business and the backbones of research itself. In case you’re wondering why you had to take this class, please understand that research is so vital to business practice that you might not even realize that what you or others in your company are doing is actually “research.” Asking customers to complete customer satisfaction surveys, reading customers’ comments on your company’s Facebook page, keeping track of what new products your competitors are selling, and tracking sales over a given period of time, are all examples of research. Research makes your company stronger because it informs you about what your business is doing well and what it can do better, why you are losing or gaining customers, how to make business processes more efficient, and what you should be doing next – and that’s just for starters. Research in business helps us make the best decisions possible to move our companies forward.

When we talk about “research” in this class, it means original research. You might have previously thought about “research” as what you do when you need to find articles or books as you’re writing a paper. In that case, the research consists of summarizing and processing what you’ve read about what other people found out as they explored a topic. But it’s not just essential to do research for our organizations; it’s important to do good research. Perhaps the data that you collect while you are performing original research is not reliable – you didn’t collect enough data to correlate location and grades, the students you talked to aren’t representative of all students because they’re all maintaining 4.0 GPAs, or the methods you chose simply don’t answer your research questions. If any or all of these things happen, your research results will not be useful, and that means you can’t really make informed decisions using that information. In this class, we will talk about how to do research well, from clearly defining everything that you are studying to choosing appropriate methods to collecting, analyzing, and summarizing your research data.

This week, you will be learning about literature reviews, research questions, and hypotheses. Here are some brief definitions:

A literature review is a thoughtfully constructed summary of what has already been researched and written about a topic. You can learn more about literature reviews by watching the webinar called “APA & Beyond!: Literature Reviews” at https://sites.google.com/site/usdlawebinarseries/webinar-archives/2014-03-20-apa--beyond-literature-reviews.

A research question is what you want to find out in your research. Original research means that you are collecting and analyzing data specifically collected to answer “research questions” that haven’t been previously answered. For example, a research question for Ashford University might be, “Why are some of University’s students not successful in school?”

This would be an important question for employees to answer because we want our students to succeed. We could use many different research methods to answer this question. For example, we could send online surveys to our students and ask them what helps them succeed in school. We could gather several students in a room and talk with them about what we could do better to help them. We could look at students’ course grades and try to correlate them with other factors, such as degree programs, age, geographic location, whether they have jobs and families, and so on. The methods we use to answer our research questions depend on what exactly we want to answer and what data is available to us.

A hypothesis is a statement of the business problem you’re investigating in your research as well as your “best guess” about why the problem is happening. Your guess should be educated; that is, it should be informed by your literature review, research you’ve already performed on the topic, or other sources. For example, “Car accidents are happening at the intersection of Locust Street and 10th Street because the traffic lights are badly timed” states the problem (car accidents) and the guess (bad traffic lights).