Performance Objective

Use the book’s guidance to acquire skills in selecting a topic, crafting a research question, finding sources in print and on the Internet, choosing a suitable design and pairing it with a method for data collection, analyzing data, and producing a report of your results.

Enabling Objectives

1. Evaluate the three reasons to study business: diversity of disciplinary choices, career variety, and salary expectations.
2. Become sensitive to the gap that exists between what students think they know, the level of analytical and research skills they possess, and what they demonstrate to employers on the job. Evaluate and expand the research skills you need to fast track your career: making sound decisions, contributing to executive research, buying research services, and becoming a research specialist.
3. Define business research from the perspective of problem-solving for business decisions.
4. Distinguish among the purposes of business research: reporting, exploring, describing, explaining, predicting, and changing (action research).
5. Provide examples to differentiate basic, practical, and applied research.
6. Outline eight defining characteristics for judging a research report: ethical issues, the research purpose, design, procedures, data and instrumentation, findings, researcher qualifications, and outcomes.
7. Discuss how philosophical orientations influence research strategy, namely the choice of quantitative or qualitative research.
8. Become familiar with the road map metaphor for the research process as its phases take you from exploring, planning, creating, conducting, collecting, and analyzing to ultimately writing your report.