Exam 5: The Research Process: Elements of Research Design

Our research question determines the unit of analysis.

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO)of a multinational corporation wants to know the profits made during the past 5 years by each of the subsidiaries in England,Germany,France,and Spain.It is possible that there are many regional offices of these subsidiaries in each of these countries.The profits of the various regional centers for each country have to be aggregated and the profits for each country for the past 5 years provided to the CFO.Hence,the 'unit of analysis' is the country.

Which of the following is most suitable when there is little to no insight in a certain problem or when there is no information available on how similar problems or research issues have been solved in the past?

The extent of interference by the researcher with the normal flow of work at the workplace has a direct bearing on whether the study undertaken is causal or correlational.

Correlational studies are invariably conducted in contrived settings,whereas most rigorous causal studies are done in non-contrived lab settings.

The goal of a ?_____________ study,hence,is to offer to the researcher a profile of the phenomena of interest from an individual,organizational,industry-oriented,or other perspective.

A marketing manager aims to investigate the relationship between customer satisfaction and store loyalty among British consumers.For this purpose,data will have to be collected from British stores and the 'unit of analysis' is the country.

Studies,when data on the dependent variable are gathered at two or more points in time to answer the research question,are called:

Knowledge of research design details also helps managers to study and intelligently comment on research proposals.

A study can be done in which data are gathered just once,perhaps over a period of days or weeks or months,in order to answer a research question.Such studies are called:

If a bank manager wants to analyze the relationship between interest rates and bank deposit patterns of clients,a 'field study' is the most suitable method of investigation.

Methodological rigor increases as we move progressively from an exploratory study to a hypothesis-testing study,and with this,the costs of research also increase.

A bank manager wants to determine the cause-and-effect relationship between interest rate and the inducements it offers to clients to save and deposit money in the bank.What is the appropriate study setting?

Which of the following studies is a causal study? The researcher tries to find out:

____________ studies are also necessary when some facts are known,but more information is needed for developing a viable theoretical framework.

A marketing manager is interested in tracing the pattern of sales of a particular product in four different regions of the country on a quarterly basis for the next 2 years.This is an example of a:

Whether a study is a causal or a correlational one depends on the type of research questions asked and how the problem is defined.

Experimental designs invariably are longitudinal studies since data are collected both before and after a manipulation.

In studies conducted to establish cause-and-effect relationships,the researcher tries to manipulate certain variables so as to study the effects of such manipulation on the dependent variable of interest.

The unit of analysis refers to the level of aggregation of the data collected during the subsequent data analysis stage.