COURSE MANUAL

Business Research Techniques for Pre-master

Course code 320087-B-6

FALL 2022
1. General information

Instructors:

Anne van der Vliet (Coördinator)

Room: K753
Iryna Dehtyarova
Room: K713
Linda Arts
Room: K751

If you have questions related to the organization of the course, please follow the procedure described
below before sending an e-mail:
1. Consult the Course Manual and the FAQ page on Canvas.
2. Check the Announcements on Canvas.
3. If you send us an e-mail (after following steps 1-2 above), please ALWAYS send it to
BRT@tilburguniversity.edu. We aim to provide you with an answer within three working days.
If you do not receive a reply, the answer can be found in the Course Manual or on Canvas.
Please do NOT send e-mails to the instructors’ personal Tilburg University e-mail addresses
(these e-mails will not be answered).

2. Course description

Managers unceasingly face business problems. For example, a management accountant may query
why a firm’s largest international customers are becoming less profitable each year. A CFO may
wonder how a takeover will affect a firm’s stock price. A marketing manager may question why home
delivery is successful in the domestic market but not in neighboring countries. A human resource
manager may want to know how a new performance appraisal system will affect employees’ work
satisfaction. An entrepreneur may wonder which website design comes with more online purchases.

Problems of moderate difficulty may be researched by managers themselves. To study more complex
business problems, managers may turn to external research agencies or in-house research teams.

Regardless of whether you will be doing the research yourself or will bring in a third party to carry out
the research, you need a firm grasp of business-research fundamentals to make sound business
decisions. Managers knowledgeable about business research have a substantial lead over those
without such knowledge. Accordingly, this course aims to get you acquainted with the fundamentals
of researching a business problem.

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In the first two classes of the course, we will introduce you to the building blocks of (scientifically
sound) business research and provide you with a roadmap of the research process. Subsequently, we
will introduce you to a wide variety of data-collection strategies – ranging from archival over survey
to experimental research – that each come with advantages and limitations.

3. Course structure
We aim to educate you on the skills needed to evaluate, delegate, and perform business research. We
will do this via (1) Grasple, (2) Q&A lectures, (3) interactive tutorials, and (4) web-based assignments.

Grasple is an online platform where you can study the course material and practice with it. Almost
every week, we expect you to complete one Grasple module through self-study. In addition, almost
every two weeks, we organize an online (live) Q&A lecture to answer the questions you may have
about the two previous Grasple modules. Approximately two weeks before each Q&A, we will open a
discussion board on Canvas where you can post the questions you would like to see answered. During
the Q&A lecture we will (only) cover the questions posted on this discussion board (we will not answer
questions sent to us by e-mail). Also, we will not answer questions about other modules.

Your research skills will further be trained in the interactive tutorials (see 7. Interactive Tutorials). We
will work on cases that will allow you to dive deeper into the various stages of the research process
and the various types of research strategies. Throughout these tutorials, we will challenge you to
adopt a critical attitude.

Finally, your skills will be trained in several web-based assignments (see 8.2. Web-based assignments),
which you are expected to carry out individually.

4. Learning goals
After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:
• explain the importance of business research and the steps in the deductive and inductive
research process.
• translate a business problem into a researchable and relevant problem statement, set of
research questions, conceptual model (variables and their interrelationships), and
hypotheses.
• choose/evaluate a sampling method, measures, and a statistical analysis in the context of a
survey, experimental, or archival study.

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 • recognize/evaluate the advantages and limitations of experimental research, survey research,
and archival research for a given business problem.
• explain the fundamentals of qualitative research.
• apply basic statistical analyses (e.g., measurement reliability, t-tests, linear regression) to a
given research problem, and analyze the results.

5. Relation of the course to other courses in the curriculum

The courses “Academic Competences” and “Business Research Techniques for Pre-master” are
complementary. In any research process, to reach your research objective, you will need to (1)
formulate a problem statement and develop a theoretical framework based on the extant literature,
and (2) choose an appropriate research strategy and gather the data.

Whereas “Academic Competences” focuses mainly on the former, the “Business Research
Techniques” course concentrates on the latter. Additionally, in contrast to the “Statistics for Pre-
master” course, the emphasis in this course is not on the execution of statistical analyses but on the
definition of the business problem up to the different research strategies and data-collection methods
that you can use to address the problem. Nevertheless, we occasionally integrate “Statistics for Pre-
master” notions to let you understand how statistics fit into the greater “scheme” of conducting a
business research project.

These three courses, in combination, will serve as a stepping stone to the Master Thesis, for which
you will carry out your own research – following the research process and choosing one of the data-
collection strategies as outlined in this course.

6. Course material

Mandatory: • Grasple self-study modules

• Grasple handouts (posted on Canvas)

• Set of articles (URL posted on Canvas)*

• Three web-based assignments (posted on Canvas)

All materials (mandatory and recommended) will be posted on Canvas.

* You can download the articles using Tilburg University’s license: note that you must first establish a
VPN connection if you download these articles off-campus.

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7. Interactive Tutorials
The course comes with two interactive on-campus tutorials (in calander weeks 44 and 46). These
tutorials will be taught on-campus in groups of approx. 80 students.

Since we want to give you the possibility to choose for yourself when you want to attend the tutorial,
we have scheduled various on-campus sessions during these two weeks. These tutorial sessions might
not all be visible to you in MyTimeTable. As a result, we are going to work with sign-up sheets where
you can see all the tutorial sessions and sign up for one. The sign-up sheets will be visible in the specific
module of that interactive tutorial. This means that you need to sign up for one session via the sign-
up sheet and that you need to ignore the schedule in MyTimeTable.

To create maximum learning effects, we expect you to take responsibility and (1) study the lecture
material (using Grasple) and (2) prepare the corresponding exercises before each tutorial. We also
expect you to actively contribute to the tutorials by giving answers to the questions.

8. Evaluation
8.1 Exam
The exam consists of multiple-choice (MC) questions. A “standard-setting” correction for guessing will
be applied. A “standard-setting” correction means that you must answer more than the traditional
50% of questions correctly to pass. The cut-off point/pass mark will be higher to compensate for
questions you answered correctly by guessing. To illustrate, with four choice options, you will have to
answer 25 out of 40 questions1 correctly to obtain a grade of 5.5. A correct answer yields a positive
score. A wrong answer or an unanswered question results in zero points. Therefore, it is in your best
interest to answer all questions, even those you are unsure of, since wrong answers do not cause you
to lose points.

The standard formula considers the odds you have to guess the correct answer. Those odds depend
on the number of choice options. For determining the cut-off point, we use the following formula:
c = 𝑁((𝑛+1)/2𝑛), where 𝑐 is the cut-off point, 𝑁 is the number of questions, 𝑛 is the number of
choice options per question, and all questions are presumed to be weighted equally.

1 The numbers (40 exam questions, four answering options) are illustrations. Depending upon the way in which the exam
will be organized, the number of questions and answering options may differ. Also the calculation example is, therefore,
indicative and merely meant to demonstrate how the guessing correction works. No rights can be derived from these
exemplary formulae.

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For the conversion of the number of correct answers to the final grade, we use the formulae below:
4.5
If 𝑦 ≥ 𝑐, then Final Grade = 5.5 + (𝑦 − 𝑐)
𝑁−𝑐
5.5
If 𝑦 < 𝑐, then Final Grade = 𝑦
𝑐

In these formulae, 𝑦 is the number of correct answers, 𝑐 is the cut-off point (e.g., 25/40), and 𝑁 is the
number of questions, or, in other words, the maximum score on the examination (e.g., 40). The table
below indicates which score you will obtain according to different numbers of correct answers:

Number of correct answers Final score on 10 (not rounded)

5 1.100
10 2.200
15 3.300
20 4.400
25 5.500
30 7.000
35 8.500
40 10.000

8.2 Web-based assignments

The course comes with three web-based assignments.

8.2.1 Web-based assignment 1: Survey research

This assignment covers survey research. It contains questions about the research process and
the research design. Further, it integrates notions of “Statistics for Pre-master” to let you
better understand how statistics fit into the greater scheme of conducting survey research.
The assignment will be available on Canvas from November 2, 16:30 – November 16, 16:30.

8.2.2 Web-based assignment 2: Experimental research

This assignment covers experimental research. It contains questions about the research
process and the research design. Again, it integrates notions of “Statistics for Pre-master” to
let you better understand how statistics fit into the greater scheme of conducting
experimental research. The assignment will be available on Canvas from November 9, 16:30
– November 23, 16:30.

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8.2.3 Web-based assignment 3: Archival research
This assignment covers archival research. It contains questions about the research process
and the research design. Again, it integrates notions of “Statistics for Pre-master” to let you
better understand how statistics fit into the greater scheme of conducting archival research.
The assignment will be available on Canvas from November 16, 16:30 – November 30, 16:30.

8.3 Final grade

The final grade for the course is determined as follows:

Exam: Weight 85%

Web-based assignments: Weight 15% (5% each)
Minimum requirements: To pass the course, students must score 5.5 or higher on the exam. In
addition, the final grade for the course needs to be at least 5.5.2

Please note:
(1) Your grades for the assignments are always incorporated in calculating your final course grade
for the first sit. For the resit, your assignment grades are considered if they increase your final
course grade. If your assignment grades decrease your final course grade in the resit, the exam
will contribute 100% to the final course grade.
(2) If you participate in both the first sit and the exam resit, the highest obtained grade for the exam
is used to compute your final course grade.

2
The final result of a course is expressed on a scale of 1 to 10, with intermediate grades of 0.5. The grade 5.5 is
not awarded. Final grades from 4.75 to 5.49 are rounded to 5.0. Final grades from 5.50 to 6.24 are rounded to
6.0 (see Rules and Guidelines of the Examination Board at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management
Article 22.3)

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9. Course schedule

WEEK MODULE CLASS* SELF-STUDY GRASPLE

35 1 Introduction Lecture The Research Process

36 2 Theory Formation

37 3 Q&A Lecture (modules 1 and 2) Choosing a Research Strategy

38 4 Collecting & Analyzing Data

39 5 Q&A Lecture (modules 3 and 4) Reliability & Validity

40 6 Survey Research

41 7 Q&A Lecture (modules 5 and 6) Experimental Research

42 8 Archival Research

43 9 Qualitative Research

44 10 Tutorial 1 (Survey and ---

Experimental Lab Research)
Web- based assignment 1: Survey Research (November 2, 16:30 – November 16, 16:30)
45 11 Q&A Lecture (modules 7, 8 and ---
9)
Web-based assignment 2: Experimental Research (November 9, 16:30 – November 23, 16:30)
46 12 Tutorial 2 (Archival and ---
Experimental Field Research)
Web-based assignment 3: Archival Research (November 16, 16:30 – November 30, 16:30)
47 13 Wrap-Up Lecture ---

* All Q&A lectures will take place online via Zoom. The interactive yutorials will take place on-campus.
For the times and dates of the Q&A lectures, please consult MyTimetable. For the times and dates of
the tutorial sessions, please consult Canvas.

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