RM27159-Assignment of Research Method
Understanding and critical awareness of the key
components of quantitative research.
Assignment:
The aim of this assignment is to test your understanding and critical awareness of the key
components of quantitative research. More specifically, this assignment aims at examining
your knowledge with respect to your understanding and critical evaluation of the key
components required of an original and effective well performed research, your ability to
analyse and critique the validity and limitations of various research methods as well as your
written communication.
In doing so, you will have to design, conduct, analyse and interpret a small-scale
quantitative research project on a topic of your choice. You might like to use this as a pilot
study or just investigate something you are interested in.
The individual assignment should be divided into 5 parts and its structure should be similar
to an academic quantitative journal article.
Part 1: Introduction: research motive and problem analysis (around 200 words)
More specifically this part should include a very brief background to your research
Specifically,
Why does this research need to be carried out?
Assignment:
The aim of this assignment is to test your understanding and critical awareness of the key
components of quantitative research. More specifically, this assignment aims at examining
your knowledge with respect to your understanding and critical evaluation of the key
components required of an original and effective well performed research, your ability to
analyse and critique the validity and limitations of various research methods as well as your
written communication.
In doing so, you will have to design, conduct, analyse and interpret a small-scale
quantitative research project on a topic of your choice. You might like to use this as a pilot
study or just investigate something you are interested in.
The individual assignment should be divided into 5 parts and its structure should be similar
to an academic quantitative journal article.
Part 1: Introduction: research motive and problem analysis (around 200 words)
More specifically this part should include a very brief background to your research
Specifically,
Why does this research need to be carried out?
Is there a gap/debate in the literature?
Part 2: Research framework: literature and hypothesis (around 200 words)
More specifically this part should include a very brief review of literature to outline relevant
concepts. It should lead into an outline of your research questions or/and hypotheses.
Part 3: Research Design: Data collection and Empirical Analysis (around 500 words)
This part is the core methodology hence it should show how you constructed your
questionnaire (why those questions – relate to your Part 2), which are your secondary data
sources, your sampling strategy, data collection procedures and how you imputed loaded
the data into SPSS
Part 4: Analysis: Analysis and discussion of results (around 500 words)
This part is the continuation of Part 3 hence it should include the analysis of your
collected data as well as the justification of the chosen statistical tests. It is vital that, in this
part, you relate back to Parts 1 and 2 (i.e. what research questions you wanted to answer).
Part 5: Conclusions: Reflection of findings, limitations and ethical considerations (around
200 words)
This part forms the concluding remarks of your work. Hence, it should report and
discuss your findings, possible limitations of your work as well as any research implications
and/or relevance for management.
It is strongly recommended that you start designing your questionnaire and/or collecting
your secondary data as soon as possible as it will not be possible to write the assignment
just before the deadline if you have not done the preparatory data design and collection
(i.e. questionnaire) beforehand. The minimum sample of your respondents should not be
less than 30 and the minimum questions should be 10 (around 2-3 pages questionnaire).
You can have your classmates filling out the questionnaire as part of the learning process.
Beyond that, I strongly encourage you to go out and recruit real respondents and let this be
a real learning experience. The questionnaire administration procedure would bring out
many issues that were not prominent until now. I expect you to finish the data collection
process in time so that you have enough time to write your assignment on time.
At this stage, I will recommend you use SPSS for your data analysis. However, if you feel
comfortable with other statistical packages, like for example STATA, you can do so. If you
need more help and time to practice the use of SPSS please us this link for on-line tutorials:
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/. I am sure you will find them very useful.
The maximum word count for your work is 2000 words (excluding submission of your SPSS
output file and your questionnaire). Please remember that the SPSS file and your
questionnaire will NOT be part of your word count.
Remember, we are aiming at your ability to identify how you undertook the research
project concerning data design, collection and analysis. Please make sure to complete an
ethics checklist before you undertake your research.