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Business Research Methods Manual - Chapter 1

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Research Methods Manual – Chapter 1

By

Neale G O’Connor

2006
 CHAPTER 1.
INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH
METHODS AND FINDING A
RESEARCH TOPIC
Learning Objective: Understand the
scope of research in Accountancy
and finding a topic of interest
Library Resources, Research issues in
the Hong Kong indigenous setting.
CHAPTER 2. CHAPTER 3.
DOING THE RESEARCH -- DOING THE RESEARCH –
PROPOSAL STAGE THE MODEL
Learning Objective: To Learning Objective: To
understand the building blocks understand the building blocks
for a research proposal. for a research proposal

CHAPTER 4. CHAPTER 5.
COMMUNICATING DOING THE RESEARCH --
THE MESSAGE DESIGN AND
Learning Objective: To IMPLEMENTATION
understand how to effectively Learning Objective: To
and efficiently communicate understand alternatives to good
your message research design.

CHAPTER 6.
DOING THE RESEARCH
-- DATA ANALYSIS
Learning Objective:
To understand how to run simple
diagnostic and hypotheses tests
of data.

RESEARCH METHODS
 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH METHODS AND FINDING A
RESEARCH TOPIC

Learning Objective: Understand the scope of research in Accountancy and finding a topic of interest
-- Library Resources, Research factory and Research issues in the Hong Kong indigenous setting .

Introduction

1. What is scientific research? Task 1 – to help student appreciate the long term value of
different types of information/knowledge
1.1 Part 1 – external sources of information in your job.
1.2 Part 2 – why are these sources important for your job?
1.3 Part 3 – To what extent will these source be important in five years time
1.4 Part 4 – What is scientific research?
1.5 Part 5 – Why is research important?

2. What is scientific research?

2.1 Distinguishing scientific research
2.2 Is polling scientific research?
2.3 Tree of knowledge –building blocks

3. Building blocks of a research proposal

4. Finding a topic of interest. Task 2 – to help students get started with their topic of
interest
4.1 Drawing on your comparative advantage
4.2 Look at practice
4.3 Review past MAIA projects
4.4 Consultation with potential supervisor
4.5 Where do I start?

5. Identifying the stakeholder of interest

6. Library work – the academic literature.

1. Task 1 – What is Scientific Research?

Task 1 - What is Scientific Research?

Please choose two classmates to work through this example with:

First read and think about the question.

1. What external sources of information do you access for your job? List 5 sources of
information (be specific – for example which newspaper, which web stie?)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.

2. Why are these sources important for your current job?

3. To what extent will an article or data you read from these sources will be important in five
years time?
a. No value
b. Little value
c. Some value
d. Great value
e. Enormous value

4. What is scientific research?

5. Why is research important?

 2. What is scientific research?

- Trying to find out something new

- Numerous observations, trends, relationships
- Attempting to add to previous knowledge
- Building blocks
- Using methods that help approve what we think or expect to see

2.1 Distinguishing scientific research

- Theory and timelessness

- Theories versus journalism
- Building blocks
- Can we build (replicate, reproduce and add to) on the results?

2.2 Is polling scientific research?

- What do we learn?
- Can we build on the results?
- Is what we learn actionable in the future?

2.3 Tree of Knowledge – A building blocks approach

- Keep your project narrow and focuses

- Not too many variables
- You do not have a lifetime to do a research project
- Do a little bit, let other researchers add to your results
- Be a building block, don’t try and create the wall yourself

Figure 1.1 Tree of Knowledge – Knowledge Building Blocks

Figure 1.2 Tree of Knowledge – Theory is the Glue

Knowledge

Understanding about relationship

b/w variables & time
Theory Concepts

Information

Summaries of Data

- Means
- Average
Organize the data

Data
3. Building blocks of a research proposal

Figure 1.3 Building blocks of research proposal – relevant questions and tasks

What is your comparative advantage, interest? Chpt 1

TASK 2

What are the recent business and professional journal articles in your area? Chpt 1
What are the relevant academic articles in your area? TASK 3

Who is my stakeholder? Chpt 2

What is my basic research question? Keep it simple! TASK 4a

What is the evidence of stakeholder interest in my question? Chpt 2

Recent professional journal articles TASK 4b

What are some of the article findings on this question? Chpt 2

What gaps exist in the current knowledge of the literature? TASK 5a

What is my model focus? Exploratory or Refined? Keep it exploratory Chpt 3

What are the dependent and independent variables in my model? TASK 6a TASK

Basic research proposal Chpt 4

TASK 7
 Figure 1.4 Initial exploratory stages of your research topic

1. 2. 3.

Your Five Relevant Scientific

Professional Research
Career
Journal Articles
of Articles

Interest

4. Finding a topic of interest

Figure 1.5 What specific knowledge & skills do you need for your career?

1. Your Career of Interest

 4.1 Drawing on your comparative advantage

The firm you work for – may provide an opportunity to gather data that answers a specific problem,
research question. For example, the problem may relate to the use of reward systems and performance
of managers in the Hong Kong office versus the Beijing, Shanghai office of your company. The sample
may not be great but access to the firm may give you the chance to interview six managers in each
office for a comparative analysis of the performance and reward systems between the two countries.
Examples of previous projects have included – A comparison of 4 pairs of high and low performing
JVs in four different regions in China. The study focused on the nature of the control system,
commitment of the partners and JV performance. A senior controller in the foreign parent company
office located in Hong Kong undertook this study.

Your network of contacts. Do you have a large and sufficient network with which you can arrange
interviews with say a dozen managers about a particular research issue?

Your experience counts toward guiding the direction of the project. For example, a second project
focused on the general trend in foreign investment towards the use of wholly owned subsidiary form of
governance of investment in China. A product development manager who had experienced these trends
personally during his work in China undertook this study.

Your career track counts – a project that requires you to go outside of your current network and work
place can still be considered if it contributes to your future career track. Such project may put you in
contact with a management-consulting firm that may provide future career opportunities.

Drawing on a current management issue that has been recently investigated in another country may be
sufficient to motivate participation by managers outside of your network. For example, a project was
undertaken by three students that examined the impact of adoption of case mix funding on management
governance of Hong Kong Hospitals. The issue was a very current one and it drew on a similar study
recently undertaken in Australia and Canada. This study provided guidance for the replication project
undertaken in Hong Kong.

4.2 Look at Practice

Your current organization is likely to have given you ideas to study. Such areas may be management
control related issues or accounting disclosure type issues.

Read some of the professional magazines for current issues of interest. Often authors of these articles
cite significant articles in the academic literature. This provides a starting point for further reading in
the academic literature. This approach is likely to be more interesting as you can see the practical fruits
of a particular line of enquiry that may not be so obvious when reading about the same issues in the
academic literature.

4.3 Review past MAIA projects

- Strengths and Weaknesses

- Development of research question
- Data collection
- Get a feel for the issues research and the methods undertaken to study them.

4.4 Consultation with potential supervisor

- Obtain feedback on draft (one page) proposal from a potential supervisor

- Seek out alternatives, vis a vis research question, motivation and method
4.5 Where do I start?

It is important that you gain some personal motivation from the topic you chose, otherwise you may get
locked into a project in which you only see the rules and assessment requirements as the solution to
completion and freedom at last.

After you have an idea of a topic of interest, it is important that you develop some of the following
habits.

Compile a database of all the significant articles in your area of research. Some articles may not be
available for two to four weeks, so plan to order them in advance.

Spend time each week to read, and reflect (by writing ideas in a notebook). At least five hours every
week should be devoted to reading. Reading helps to clarify your thoughts, build on what you already
know.

Begin to structure your thoughts early, using pictures, graphs etc on notepaper. Show them to your
supervisor for quick on the spot feedback.

Begin to write, type your ideas as soon as possible. Get into the habit of writing. Plan to spend at least
three hours every weekend to write something. Writing takes time, and it acts to provide feedback to
you and your supervisor.

Figure 1.6 Your Research Proposal - Where is it headed?

What is in Concerns of
your other People
Heart?
(stakeholders)

Become a Novelist
Add value to your career
 How to manage your time – my experience from the research battle front

1. Constraint - My real constraint is my ability to think and I try and organize everything around this constraint.
This is a double edged sword - on the one hand it is the most different aspect of any motivation (it is always
easier to get motivated on tasks that require less processing) - on the other hand because your work in thinking
is with you 24 hours per day you can actually work 24 hours per day (ie it is like that you go to sleep with a
problem and the next morning you have a solution to this problem. The clearer that you can think about a topic
the easier it is to write about it.

2. Strategy - is to maximise the use of this constraint -

a. That is to do some reading every week (should be every day but I get lazy at times) thus you have something
to think about.

b. Work on one research paper at a time - often I have three or more papers that are requiring attention - but I
always focus on one of them only due to my limited thinking capability.

c. Delegate small thinking tasks to helpers (pay them out of your own funds if you have too - I have done this
in the past before I got research grants) - ie - data entry, word processing of different parts of readings - so as
to later summarise these for reflection and quotation in your writing. I upload an example summary of what I
did in a review of 50 plus articles in the China reform literature.

3. Task (not time) focused – the real difference is that academia is task focused – there is no boss asking you
to meet deadlines each week or at the end of each month. But you create you own personal deadlines.

Task example – revising a research paper

I normally set a 1 to 2 month time line for revision and resubmission of a paper that has come back from the
journal reviewers. During these two months – it takes up to 1 – 2 weeks to get back into the paper (really
thinking about the issues and how to answer all of the concerns). During this time you pretend to know the
answers by writing down quick solutions to each of the reviewer’s comments – this is a task driven procedure
because you are not focusing yourself to think to much at this early stage. But after you have gone through this
you have probably identified some areas (reviewer requests) that require further readings and thought. This
next stage requires you to leave the paper and do another literature search and really get to the bones of what
the reviewer has asked for. At this stage I get my helper to type up the reviewer comments in the form of a
table (two columns) one for the reviewer’s comments and one for my response. I try and break the comments
down into many different points as possible and assign one row for each point. I also copy and paste the letter
to the editor and rewrite parts of this as if I have completed to revision –this is important because in the process
of drafting the letter to the editor you are painting a picture in your mind about the completion of the revised
manuscript – this in turn increases your motivation and helps you move onto rewriting the manuscript in a way
that directly addresses the reviewer’s concerns. By now (probably the third or fourth week) you are ready to
type up in draft form the responses to each of the reviewer’s concerns in each of the rows of the resubmission
document.

The revised manuscript must be read and checked again - - I have a helper check every reference and properly
format the reference list at the back of the manuscript. After further revising – I am ready to send the paper to
an editor (Dr Mike Poole) for editing. When the edited version comes back – I check the paper again. I am
now in a position to rewrite each of my responses to the reviewer’s comments and I can now insert the location
of each and every one of my changes (page number and line number – the more you direct the reviewer to the
changes to have made that easier it is for him/her to understand and assess your response – then the reviewer
will be in a more approving state of mind to grant you a favourable review.

Finally, I may wait one more week and read the paper again before sending it off. I may even begin on the next
project during this time so as to purge some of the very intensive thinking/thoughts that have built up during
the revision process. Reading the paper again a week (or more) later we be beneficial because you always find
some errors, little things that were not picked up previously (this always happens).
 Task 2 - Your Comparative Advantage

1. What do you consider to be your main strength in terms of knowledge/experience in

particular business/accounting activities?

2. In relation to undertaking this unit, based on your current knowledge, What do

You consider being your main weakness?

3. Describe three areas/topics of interest for this unit?

4. What is your Learning Objective, for:

a. Master in International Accounting Course

b. Research Methods in Accounting

AIM TO SPEND AT LEAST EIGHT HOURS PER WEEK (FROM WEEK ONE) IN
LISTENING, READING AND WRITING
5. Identifying the stakeholder of interest

Once you understand your own personal interest in learning (the area that makes you excited about
learning more) you are in a position to find out who are the people/organizations that share the same
interest. These people are the ones that are likely to be interested in knowing about your research or
basically, your quest to understand more in a particular area. For example if your interest is in corporate
governance then there are a range of stakeholders that can be identified: securities regulators, company
secretaries, auditors, boards of directors, CEOs, government. Moreover, these stakeholders have
different motivations for understanding more about corporate governance. Auditors may need to
understand more about those aspects of corporate governance that are related to audit risk. Securities
regulators need to understand more about corporate governance so that they can formulate more
efficient regulations, or to set appropriate penalties for those who break the rule. As you can see
different stakeholders have different interests and therefore you need to be as specific as possible with
respect to the stakeholder that you think is most closely relates to your research interest. Once you
have identified your stakeholder you will be in a better position to think about what exactly the angle
of your research will take. For example, if your stakeholder is an auditor, then your research may focus
on audit risk, or the efficiency of an audit. Or if your stakeholder is a securities regulator then your
research will probably focus on the effectiveness of the current regulations, or the proposal for new
regulations. In short, each stakeholder has his/her/its own agenda. You as a researcher need to
understand this agenda very well so that you maximise the value-added that you get out of your research
effort.

Figure 1.7 Journal type (academic vs professional) and research purpose

1. Research Interest

(because it’s personal)

Professional JNL

Building Blocks
Academic JNL
Newspaper

- Theory
- Model

2. Stakeholder 4. Literature Review

(because it’s for (because you start

3. Research Question

(because every question

Figure 1.8 What professional journal articles can you find that are directly relevant to you
moving ahead in your career?

2. Three Relevant Professional Journal Articles

Figure 1.9 What academic journal articles can you find that are directly relevant to these
issues?

3. Scientific Research Articles

6 Library work – the academic literature

Learn the CD ROM database of abstracts (see Figure 1.1). This is important to collecting the recent
articles on a specific area. Also spend time flicking through articles in recent international journals of
management and accounting. For example, International Journal of Accounting, Journal of
International Business Studies, International Business Review, Management International review, and
some regional journals such as, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Pacific Review of Accounting.

Journal standing - Take note of the standing of the journal for extra guidance for projects. Greater
scope of projects and ideas are found in the lower quality journals—here you are more likely to find
project that follows a wider range of paradigms. Higher quality journals follow a narrower set of
paradigms and so may provide fewer ideas in your initial search for a project.

It is important that you can find an article that is very close to the project you wish to undertake. Such
article may be a working paper or published and could have been undertaken in another country. One
of the hallmarks on international research is the idea that findings in another country may not be
generalizable in your country because of particular cultural, economic or institutional differences.
Often one can take a project that was undertaken in another country and use it as a basis for looking at
the same problem in Hong Kong.

Figure 1.1 Library Visit Flow Chart

1. Subject
▪ Management Accounting
▪ Financial Accounting
▪ Auditing
▪ Taxation 2. Database

▪ BPO-Electronic
Reference library (ERL)

Database
3. Get Book/Article

▪ Electronic-online
▪ Library shelf
 Task 3 – Library Visit

1. Visit your college or university library, and locate THREE articles from a professional
journal that is directly related to your topic/career of interest. Create a folder in
Blackboard and upload these articles into blackboard.

2. Obtain THREE academic articles that may be related to your topic/career of interest.
First look at the references in the professional journal articles for guidance on
academic articles. After you have exhausted this source, then search of academic
articles using particular key words located in the professional journal articles. Create a
folder in Blackboard and upload these articles into blackboard.

3. From the description of how scientific inquiry takes place (which you read about in
this chapter), answer the following with respect to two of the five academic articles:

a. What is the primary question posed by the study?

b. What important factors are identified?
c. Is there an hypothesis stated? If so, what is it?
d. Describe the way the information was collected.
e. How could the results of the study affect the originally posed hypothesis?
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