RESEARCH METHODS FOR BUSSINESS STUDENT

DOSEN PENGAMPU : DR. SUJONO, S.E., M.SI

DISUSUN OLEH :

ARMAN

G2D120044

PROGRAM STUDI MANAJEMEN

PROGRAM PASCASARJANA

UNIVERSITAS HALUOLEO

KENDARI

2021

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Praise the gratitude and mercy of Allah S.W.T, because of His grace I was given health and
opportunities so that I could complete this task. On behalf of the compilers, I would like to thank the
lecturer, Dr. Sujono., S.E., M.Si who has guided and guided us in the lecture process on campus. In
this paper I present an enrichment of lecture material entitled Social Research Methods. Hopefully this
paper can be used as a reference, guide and guide for readers. It is my hope that this paper helps
increase the knowledge and experience of readers, so that I can improve the form and content of this
paper so that it can be better in the future.
Limited sources are an obstacle in the completion of this paper, but mostly I focus on the
object of study based on research conducted by experts who generally serve as course material for
students. I admit that this paper has many shortcomings because I have very little experience.
Therefore, I expect readers to provide constructive input for the perfection of this paper.

ARMAN
G2D120044

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 TABLE OF CONTENT
Cover................................................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................................ii
Table of Content.............................................................................................................................iii

Chapter 3: Critically reviewing the literature

3.1 Introduction.............................................................................................................1
3.2 The Critical Review................................................................................................1
3.3 Literature Source....................................................................................................2
3.4 Planning Your Literature Strategy..........................................................................2
3.5 Conducting Your Literature Search........................................................................2
3.6 Obtaining and Evaluating The Literature...............................................................3
3.7 Recording The Literature........................................................................................4
3.8 Using Systematic Review.......................................................................................4
3.9 Plagiarism...............................................................................................................4
Chapter 4 : Understanding research philosophy and Approaches to theory development
4.1 Introduction.............................................................................................................5
4.2 The Philosopical Underpinnings of Business and Management............................5
4.3 Five Major Philosophies.........................................................................................6
4.4 Aprroaches to Theory Development.......................................................................7

Chapter 5: Formulating the research design

5.1 Introduction..........................................................................................................8
5.2 Choice and Coherence In Research Design.........................................................8
5.3 Methodological Choice........................................................................................8
5.4 Recognising The Purpose of Your Design...........................................................9
5.5 Choosing a Research or Strategy.........................................................................10
5.6 Choosing a Time Horizon....................................................................................10
5.7 Ethabilishing the Ethics of the Research Design.................................................10
5.8 Ethabiling the Quality of the Research Design....................................................11
5.9 Taking Into Account Your Role as Researcher....................................................11

Bibliography....................................................................................................................................12

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iii

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 CHAPTER III
Critically Reviewing The Literature
3.1 Introduction
As part of your studies, you have almost certainly been asked by your tutors to ‘review the
literature’, ‘write a literature review’ or ‘critically review the literature’ on a given topic. You may be
like many students and have grown to fear the literature review, not because of the associated reading
but because of the requirement both to make reasoned judgements about the value of each piece of
work and to organise ideas and findings of value into a review. It is these two processes in particular
that many find both difficult and time consuming.

3.2 The Critical Review

The amount of literature available to help you to develop a good understanding of, and insight
into, previous research is expanding rapidly as new resources are developed and made available
online. The literature sources you are likely to make most use of are often referred to as: a)secondary
literature sources, these being formally published items such as journals and books; b) grey (or
primary) literature sources, these being items produced by all levels of government, academics,
business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which are not controlled by commercial
publishers; including materials such as reports and conference proceedings.

The Purpose And Types Of Critical Review

The precise purpose and type of critical review you undertake will depend on your research
question and aim. The most widely used types of review, along with their purpose, are summarised by
the University of Southern California (2014) and include the: Integrative review, Historical review,
Theoretical review, Methodological review, Systematic Review,

Adopting A Critical Perspective In Your Reading

Harvard College Library (2013) provides its students with a useful checklist of skills to be
practised for effective reading. These skills include:
• Previewing: which is considering the precise purpose of the text before you start reading in
order to establish it may inform your literature search.
• Annotating : that is, conducting a dialogue with yourself, the author and the issues and ideas at
stake.
• Summarising : the best way to determine that you’ve really got the point is to be able to state
it in your own words. Outlining the argument of a text is a version of annotating, and can be
done quite informally in the margins of the text.
• Comparing and contrasting : ask yourself how your thinking has been altered by this reading
or how it has affected your response to the issues and themes in your research.

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The Content Of The Critical Review
In considering the content of your critical review, you will therefore need:
• To include the key academic theories within your chosen area of research that are pertinent to
or contextualise your research question;
• To demonstrate that your knowledge of your chosen area is up to date;
• To enable those reading your project report to find the original publications which you cite
through clear complete referencing.

What is really meant by being ‘critical’ about the content

Within the context of your course you have probably already been asked to take a critical
approach for previous assignments. However, it is worth considering what we mean by critical within
the context of your literature review. Mingers (2000: 225–6) argues that there are four aspects of a
critical approach that should be fostered by management education: Critique of rhetoric; Critique of
tradition; Critique of authority; Critique of objectivity.

3.3 Literature Search

The amount of literature available to help you to develop a good understanding of, and insight
into, previous research is expanding rapidly as new resources are developed and made available
online. The literature sources you are likely to make most use of are often referred to as: secondary
literature sources, these being formally published items such as journals and books; grey (or
primary) literature sources, these being items produced by all levels of government, academics,
business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which are not controlled by commercial
publishers; including materials such as reports and conference proceedings.

3.4 Planning Your Literature Strategy

It is important that you plan this search carefully to ensure that you locate relevant and up-to-
date literature. This will enable you to establish what research has previously been published in your
area and to relate your own research to it. All our students have found their literature search a time-
consuming process, which takes far longer than expected. Fortunately, time spent planning will be
repaid in time saved when searching for relevant literature. As you start to plan your search, you need
to beware of information overload! One of the easiest ways to avoid this is to start the main search for
your critical review with clearly defined research question(s), objectives and outline proposal.

3.5 Conducting Your Literature Search

Your literature search will probably be conducted using a variety of approaches: a) searching
using online databases; b) obtaining relevant literature referenced in books and journal articles you
have already read; scanning and browsing secondary literature in your library; c) general online
searching.

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Searching Using Online Database
It is very tempting with easy access to the Internet to start your literature search with a general
search engine such as Bing or Google. While this can retrieve some useful information it must be
treated with care. Your project report is expected to be an academic piece of work and hence must use
academic sources. Therefore it is essential that you use online literature sources which provide access
to academic literature.

Searching
Most online databases and portals now allow full-text searches using natural language where
you decide on the word or phrase combinations for search terms. This means, for example, you can
search the complete text of an article using your search terms. However, some rely on or also offer the
option to search using a controlled index language of pre-selected terms and phrases or ‘descriptors’.

Browsing and scanning

Any search will find only some of the relevant literature. You will therefore also need to
browse and scan the literature. New publications such as journals are unlikely to be indexed
immediately in online databases, so you will need to browse these publications to gain an idea of their
content.

General online searching

When searching online, we recommend you keep full details of the searches you have
undertaken, making a note of: a) the search tool used; b) the precise search undertaken; c)the date
when the search was undertaken; d) the total number of items retrieved.

Institutional repositories and social networking sites

Many universities now expect their academics to deposit digital full-text copies of their
publications, particularly journal articles, in an institutional repository. This is an open access
collection of the university’s research outputs from which full-text items can be downloaded.

3.6 Obtaining and Evaluating The Literature

Although the Internet has revolutionised searching for literature, you should beware as the
quantity of material is enormous and the quality highly variable. Not surprisingly, a question
frequently asked by our students is, ‘How do I know what I’m reading is relevant?’ Two further
questions often asked by our students are, ‘How do I assess the value of what I read?’ and ‘How do I
know when I’ve read enough?’ All of these are concerned with the process of evaluation.

Assessing relevance

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 Assessing the relevance of the literature you have collected to your research depends on your
research question(s) and objectives. Remember that you are looking for relevance, not critically
assessing the ideas contained within

Assessing value
Assessing the value of the literature you have collected is concerned with the quality of the
research that has been undertaken. As such it is concerned with issues such as methodological rigour,
theory robustness and the quality of the reasoning or arguments.

Assessing sufficiency
Your assessment of whether you have read a sufficient amount is even more complex. It is
impossible to read everything, as you would never start to write your critical review, let alone your
project report. Yet you need to be sure that your critical review discusses what research has already
been undertaken and that you have positioned your research project in the wider context, citing the
main writers in the field

3.7 Recording The Literature

The process of note making will help you to think through the ideas in the literature in relation
to your research. When making your notes, make sure you always use quotation marks and note the
page number if you are copying the text exactly. This will ensure you know it is a direct quotation
when you begin to write your project report and so help you avoid committing plagiarism. In addition
to making notes, Sharp et al. (2002) identify three sets of information you need to record. These are:
Bibliographic details; Brief summary of content; Supplementary information.

3.8 Using Systematic Review

Systematic Review is a process for reviewing the literature using a comprehensive preplanned
strategy to locate existing literature, evaluate the contribution, analyse and synthesise the findings and
report the evidence to allow conclusions to be reached about what is known and, also, what is not
known (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). Originating in the medical sciences, Systematic Review has been
used widely to evaluate specific medical treatments; in the past two decades its importance has been
recognised in other disciplines.

3.9 Plagiarism
Neville (2010) argues that plagiarism is an issue that runs parallel to a debate with recurring
questions about the purpose of higher education in the twenty-first century. He notes that, on the one
hand, there is the argument that an insistence on ‘correct’ referencing is supporting a system and a
process of learning that is a legacy of a different time and society. This argument holds that
universities are enforcing upon you an arcane practice of referencing that you will probably never use

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again outside higher education. On the other hand, there is the argument that plagiarism is an attack
upon values of ethical, proper, decent behaviour – values consistent with a respect for others. These
are ageless societal values that universities should try to maintain.

CHAPTER IV
Understanding Research Philosophy and Approaches to Theory Development

4.1 Introduction
Much of this book is concerned with the way in which you collect data to answer your
research question(s). Most people plan their research in relation to a question that needs to be
answered or a problem that needs to be solved. They then think about what data they need and the
techniques they use to collect them. You are not therefore unusual if early on in your research you
consider whether you should, for example, use a questionnaire or undertake interviews. However, how
you collect your data belongs in the centre of the research ‘onion’, the diagram we use to depict the
issues underlying the choice of data collection techniques and analysis procedures. In coming to this
central point you need to explain why you made the choice you did so that others can see that your
research should be taken seriously (Crotty 1998).

4.2 The Philosopical Underpinnings of Business and Management

What is research philosophy?
The term research philosophy refers to a system of beliefs and assumptions about the
development of knowledge. Although this sounds rather profound, it is precisely what you are doing
when embarking on research: developing knowledge in a particular field. The knowledge development
you are embarking upon may not be as dramatic as a new theory of human motivation, but even
answering a specific problem in a particular organisation you are, nonetheless, developing new
knowledge.

Is there a best philosophy for business and management research?

You may be wondering at this stage whether you could take a shortcut, and simply adopt ‘the
best’ philosophy for business and management research. One problem with such a shortcut would be
the possibility of discovering a clash between ‘the best’ philosophy and your own beliefs and
assumptions. Another problem would be thatbusiness and management researchers do not agree about
one best philosophy (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2003).

Objectivism and subjectivism

Objectivism incorporates the assumptions of the natural sciences, arguing that the social
reality that we research is external to us and others (referred to as social actors). This means that,
ontologically, objectivism embraces realism, which, in its most extreme form, considers social entities

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to be like physical entities of the natural world, in so far as they exist independently of how we think
of them, label them, or even of our awareness of them.

Research paradigms
Researchers working within the regulation perspective are concerned primarily with the need
for the regulation of societies and human behaviour. They assume an underlying unity and
cohesiveness of societal systems and structures. Much of business and management research can be
classed as regulation research that seeks to suggest how organisational affairs may be improved within
the framework of how things are done at present rather than radically challenging the current position.

4.3 Five Major Philosophies

In this section, we discuss five major philosophies in business and management: positivism,
critical realism, interpretivism, postmodernism and pragmatism.

Positivism
Positivism relates to the philosophical stance of the natural scientist and entails working with
an observable social reality to produce law-like generalisations. It promises unambiguous and accurate
knowledge andoriginates in the works of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte and the early twentieth-
century group of philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle. The label positivism refers to
the importance of what is ‘posited’ – i.e. ‘given’. This emphasises the positivist focus on strictly
scientific empiricist method designed to yield pure data and facts uninfluenced by human
interpretation or bias.

Critical realism
It is important not to confuse the philosophy of critical realism with the more extreme form of
realism underpinning the positivist philosophy. The latter, sometimes known as direct realism (or
naïve empirical scientific realism), says that what you see is what you get: what we experience
through our senses portrays the world accurately. By contrast, the philosophy of critical realism
focuses on explaining what we see and experience, in terms of the underlying structures of reality that
shape the observable events.

Interpretivism
Interpretivism, like critical realism, developed as a critique of positivism but from a
subjectivist perspective. Interpretivism emphasises that humans are different from physical
phenomena because they create meanings. Interpretivists study these meanings. Interpretivism
emerged in early- and mid-twentieth-century Europe, in the work of German, French and occasionally

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English thinkers, and is formed of several strands, most notably hermeneutics, phenomenology and
symbolic interactionism (Crotty 1998).

Postmodernism
Postmodernism emphasises the role of language and of power relations, seeking to question
accepted ways of thinking and give voice to alternative marginalised views. It emerged in the late
twentieth century and has been most closely associated with the work of French philosophers Jean-
François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean
Baudrillard. Postmodernism is historically entangled with the intellectual movement of
poststructuralism.

Pragmatism
Pragmatism asserts that concepts are only relevant where they support action (Kelemen and
Rumens 2008). Pragmatism originated in the late-nineteenth–earlytwentieth- century USA in the work
of philosophers Charles Pierce, William James and John Dewey. It strives to reconcile both
objectivism and subjectivism, facts and values, accurate and rigorous knowledge and different
contextualised experiences.

4.4 Aprroaches to Theory Development

We emphasised that your research project will involve the use of theory. That theory may or
may not be made explicit in the design of the research, although it will usually be made explicit in
your presentation of the findings and conclusions. The extent to which you are clear about the theory
at the beginning of your research raises an important question concerning the design of your research
project.

Induction
An alternative approach to developing theory on retail store employee absenteeism would be
to start by interviewing a sample of the employees and their supervisors about the experience of
working at the store. The purpose here would be to get a feel of what was going on, so as to
understand better the nature of the problem. Your task then would be to make sense of the interview
data you collected through your analysis. The result of this analysis would be the formulation of a
theory, often expressed as a conceptual framework.

Abduction
Instead of moving from theory to data (as in deduction) or data to theory (as in induction), an
abductive approach moves back and forth, in effect combining deduction and induction (Suddaby
2006). This, as we have noted earlier, matches what many business and management researchers
actually do. Abduction begins with the observation of a ‘surprising fact’; it then works out a plausible
theory of how this could have occurred.

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Using approaches in combination
At this point you may be wondering whether your reasoning will be predominantly deductive,
inductive or abductive. The honest answer is, ‘it depends’. In particular, it depends on the emphasis of
the research and the nature of the research topic. A topic on which there is a wealth of literature from
which you can define a theoretical framework and a hypothesis lends itself more readily to deduction.

CHAPTER V

FORMULATING THE RESEARCH DESIGN

5.1 Introduction
In this chapter we uncover the next three layers: methodological choice, research strategy or
strategies and choosing the time horizon for your research. As we saw in Chapter 4, the way you
answer your research question will be influenced by your research philosophy and approach to theory
development. Your research philosophy and approach to theory development, whether this is
deliberate or by default, will subsequently influence your selections shown in the next three layers of
the research onion These three layers can be thought of as focusing on the process of research design,
which is the way you turn your research question into a research project. The key to these selections
will be to achieve coherence all the way through your research design.

5.2 Choice and Coherence In Research Design

Your research design is the general plan of how you will go about answering your research
question(s) (the importance of clearly defining the research question cannot be overemphasised). It
will contain clear objectives derived from your research question(s), specify the sources from which
you intend to collect data, how you propose to collect and analyse these, and discussethical issues and
the constraints you will inevitably encounter (e.g. access to data, time, location and money). Crucially,
it should demonstrate that you have thought through the elements of your particular research design.

5.3 Methodological Choice: The Use Of a Quantitative , Qualitative or Mixed Method

Research Design
One way of differentiating quantitative research from qualitative research is to distinguish
between numeric data (numbers) and non-numeric data (words, images, video clips and other similar
material). In this way, ‘quantitative’ is often used as a synonym for any data collection technique (such
as a questionnaire) or data analysis procedure (such as graphs or statistics) that generates or uses
numerical data. In contrast, ‘qualitative’ is often used as a synonym for any data collection technique
(such as an interview) or data analysis procedure (such as categorising data) that generates or uses
non-numerical data. This is an important way to differentiate this methodological choice; however,
this distinction is both problematic and narrow. It is problematic because, in reality, many business

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and management research designs are likely to combine quantitative and qualitative elements. This
may be for a number of reasons.

Quantitative Research Design

Quantitative research is generally associated with positivism, especially when used with
predetermined and highly structured data collection techniques. However, a distinction needs to be
drawn between data about the attributes of people, organisations or other things and data based on
opinions, sometimes referred to as ‘qualitative’ numbers. Quantitative research is usually associated
with a deductive approach, where the focus is on using data to test theory.

Qualitative research design

Qualitative research is often associated with an interpretive philosophy (Denzin and Lincoln
2011). Many varieties of qualitative research commence with an inductive approach to theory
development, where a naturalistic and emergent research design is used to build theory or to develop a
richer theoretical perspective than already exists in the literature. However, some qualitative research
strategies start with a deductive approach, to test an existing theory using qualitative procedures (Yin
2014). Qualitative research studies participants’ meanings and the relationships between them, using a
variety of data collection techniques and analytical procedures, to develop a conceptual framework
and theoretical contribution.

Mixed methods research design

Mixed methods research is the branch of multiple methods research that combines the use of
quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques and analytical procedures. A mixed methods
research design may use a deductive, inductive or abductive approach to theory development. For
example, quantitative or qualitative research may be used to test a theoretical proposition or
propositions, followed by further quantitative or qualitative research to develop a richer theoretical
understanding.Concurrent mixed methods research involves the separate use of quantitative and
qualitative methods within a single phase of data collection and analysis (a single-phase research
design)As we have just discussed, different combinations of mixed methods research characteristics
lead to various research designs.

5.4 Recognising The Purpose Of Your Research Design

In this section we discuss each purpose in more detail to help you to choose which of these is
appropriate to the nature of your research project.

Exploratory study
An exploratory study is a valuable means to ask open questions to discover what is happening
and gain insights about a topic of interest. Research questions that are exploratory are likely to begin
with ‘What’ or ‘How’. Questions that you ask during data collection to explore an issue, problem or
phenomenon will also be likely to start with ‘What’ or ‘How’.

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Descriptive research
The purpose of descriptive research is to gain an accurate profile of events, persons or
situations. Research questions that are descriptive are likely to begin with, or include, either ‘Who’,
‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’ or ‘How’. Questions that you ask during data collection to gain a description
of events, persons or situations will also be likely to start with, or include, ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’,
‘When’ or ‘How’.

Evaluative studies
The purpose of evaluative research is to find out how well something works. As we noted in
Section 2.4, research questions that seek to evaluate answers are likely to begin with ‘How’, or include
‘What’, in the form of ‘To what extent’. Evaluative research in business and management is likely to
be concerned with assessing the effectiveness of an organisational or business strategy, policy,
programme, initiative or process. This may relate to any area of the organisation or business: for
example, evaluating a marketing campaign, a personnel policy, a costing strategy, the delivery of a
support service.

A research Combine
A research study may combine more than one purpose in its design. This may be achieved by
the use of mixed methods in the research), to facilitate some combination of exploratory, descriptive,
explanatory or evaluative research. Alternatively a single method research design may be used in a
way that provides scope to facilitate more than one purpose.

5.5 Choosing a Research Strategy or Strategies

In our experience it is the choice between qualitative research strategies that is likely to cause
the greatest confusion. Such confusion is often justified given the diversity of qualitative strategies
(many more than those we consider), with their conflicting tensions and ‘blurred genres’ (Denzin and
Lincoln 2011: 3). In our discussion we draw out the distinctions between these strategies to allow you
to make an informed choice between qualitative strategies (as between or across quantitative and
qualitative strategies). This is intended to help you avoid the vague assertion that you are ‘doing
qualitative research’, without any further qualification! The strategies are: Experiment; Survey;
Archival and Documentary Research; Case Study; Ethnography; Action Research; Grounded
Theory; Narrative Inquiry.

5.6 Choosing a Time Horizon

An important question to be asked in designing your research is, ‘Do I want my research to be
a “snapshot” taken at a particular time or do I want it to be more akin to a diary or a series of
snapshots and be a representation of events over a given period?’ This will, of course, depend on your
research question. The ‘snapshot’ time horizon we call cross- sectional, while the ‘diary’ perspective
we call longitudinal.

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5.7 Ethabilishing the Ethics of the Research Design
Your choice of topic will be governed by ethical considerations. You may be particularly
interested to study the consumer decision to buy flower bouquets. Although this may provide some
interesting data collection challenges (who buys, for whom and why), there are not the same ethical
difficulties as will be involved in studying, say, the funeral purchasing decision. Your research design
in this case may have to concentrate on data collection from the undertaker and, possibly, the
purchaser at a time as close to the death as delicacy permits. The ideal population, of course, may be
the purchaser at a time as near as possible to the death. It is a matter of judgement as to whether the
strategy and data collection method(s) suggested by ethical considerations will yield data that are
valid. The general ethical issue here is that the research design should not subject those you are
researching to the risk of embarrassment, pain, harm or any other material disadvantage

5.8 Esthabiling the Quality of the Research Design

Underpinning our discussion of research design is the issue of the quality of the research and
its findings. This is neatly expressed by Raimond (1993: 55) when he subjects findings to the ‘how do
I know?’ test, ‘Will the evidence and my conclusions stand up to the closest scrutiny?’ For example,
how do you know that the advertising campaign for a new product has resulted in enhanced sales?
How do you know that manual employeesin an electronics factory have more negative feelings
towards their employer than their clerical counterparts? The answer, of course, is that, in the literal
sense of the question, you cannot know. All you can do is reduce the possibility of getting the answer
wrong. This is why good research design is important. This is aptly summarised by Rogers (1961;
cited by Raimond 1993: 55): ‘scientific methodology needs to be seen for what it truly is, a way of
preventing me from deceiving myself in regard to my creatively formed subjective hunches which
have developed out of the relationship between me and my material’.

5.9 Taking Into Account Your Role as Researcher

The Role Of The External Researcher
If you are a full-time student you are likely to adopt the role of an external researcher, as you
need to identify an organisation within which to conduct your research. In such cases you will need to
negotiate access to the organisation and to those from whom you would like to collect data. Having
achieved this you will need to gain their trust so that they will participate meaningfully to allow you to
collect these data. You will need to take these practical factors into account when formulating your
research question and your research design.

The Role Of The Internal Researcher Or Practitioner Researcher

If you are currently working in an organisation, you may choose to undertake your research
project within that organisation, adopting the role of an internal researcher or practitioner researcher.
As a part-time student, you will be surrounded by numerous opportunities to pursue business and

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management research. You are unlikely to encounter one of the most difficult hurdles that an external
researcher has to overcome: that of negotiating research access. Indeed, like many people in such a
position, you may be asked to research a particular problem by your employer. As an internal
researcher, another advantage for you will be your knowledge of the organisation and all this implies
about understanding the complexity of what goes on in that organisation. It will not be necessary to
spend a great deal of time ‘learning the context’ in the same way as an external researcher will need to
do.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Saunders. 2016. Research Methods for Business Student. 7th Ed.1

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