MKTG60306 Applied Business Research

Component:Individual ReportWeighting:80%
Academic year:Semester:2
Module Code:MKTG60306Level:6
Deadline:TBCTime:15:00

Learning outcome assessed

  • Understand research methods that underpin business and management
  • Formulate research questions and critically develop a programme of investigation to address them
  • Understand and critically apply the ethical and methodological dimensions of the business research process and their application
  • Develop research designs using a range of quantitative and qualitative analytical methods to address business research problems

Maximum word length:       4,000 words

The 4,000 word limit includes the abstract and excludes the reference list and appendices. You may include diagrams, figures, appendices etc. without word penalty. A sliding scale of penalties for excess length will be imposed. The penalties will be as follows:

Up to 10%       excess words                no penalty

11-20%            excess words                10% penalty

21-30%            excess words                20% penalty

31% plus         excess words                the work will be capped at a pass i.e. 40%

NB. None of the above penalties will be used to change a student mark which is above the pass mark, to one that is below the pass mark. Therefore the maximum penalty for exceeding the word limit will be a reduction to a pass grade.

Additional guidance

The following suggestions may be helpful to the students in terms of organising and preparing this assignment:

  • Read this assessment sheet carefully. Pay special attention to the assessment criteria and marking scheme. Ask your tutor if you do not understand what is required of you.
  • Review lecture and tutorial notes relating to the subject.
  • Do not use abbreviated words and phrases. For example write “do not” instead of “don’t”.
  • Avoid vague statements. Do not use expressions such as “etc.” or “and so on”.
  • Make use of a full range of academic sources including CDUT’s library, the programme reading room and the Staffordshire University’s electronic library.
  • You may use the Internet for research provided the material you use is of an academic standard.
  • Any quote from a Chinese language source must be translated into English yourself. Do not use machine translation software.
  • Reference all sources, including those from the Internet, using the Harvard Referencing System.
  • Review and revise the paper at least once before submitting. Make an appointment with your tutor to discuss your drafts.
  • Make sure you backup your work regularly on a reliable email provider e.g. Gmail or Yahoo.

Rules and regulations

You must submit the assignment yourself, to the relevant deadline on the Student Website before the deadline given above. Please keep a record of the receipt number as proof of submission. It is your responsibility to ensure the assignment is submitted in full and on time.

If you fail to submit any assessment for a module an N will be recorded(non-submission)(fail due to non-submission) for that module and you will not have a guaranteed re-sit entitlement. Any further attempt entitlement will be at the discretion of the Award Board.

If there are extenuating circumstances which might affect your ability to hand in the work on time or affect your performance then you should ask the office for help completing an “extenuating circumstances claim form.” within 5 working days after the submission deadline.

Assignments must be submitted by the due date.  The only circumstance in which assignments can be submitted late is if an extenuating circumstances claim is made.  In these circumstances work may be submitted up to 5 working days late only (this is not automatic).  If the extenuating circumstances are upheld, the assignment will be graded as usual.  If the claim is rejected and the work is of a pass grade a maximum of a 40% (R) will be awarded.  If your work is submitted after the 5 working days a 0 will be awarded.

You should consult your student handbook for full details of Staffordshire University’s assessment regulations, including what is considered academic dishonesty. Contrary to popular student belief getting caught and being punished for committing plagiarism is not a rare occurrence. For further details please consult the University web-site at the following address:

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/legal/policies/awardregs/index.jsp

We strongly recommend that you read the full document at the above address. Summarised below are some of the key points. You will have committed plagiarism and may be caught, reported and punished (as described below) if you:

  • Copy extensively from the work of others (from sources such as books, magazines, journals, web-sites for example) and submit the work as your own.
  • Copy another student’s work and submit it for assessment under your own name.
  • Allow another student to copy your work and they then submit it for assessment under their name.
  • The most up to date regulations on Academic Misconduct are available at:

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/assets/Procedure for Dealing with Breaches of Assessment Regulations-Academic Misconduct 2016-17 v1_tcm44-91272.pdf

Regarding collusion, you should be aware that if for example, you allow another student to borrow your work and they subsequently copy some of that work and present it as their own, you and they will both be punished even though they copied your work.

What happens if you get caught?

Examination Boards may punish offending students in a number of ways. Typically, punishments range from reducing grades, making students re-sit modules, through to failing students on a module or an entire award.

The University regards this form of cheating as a serious offence.

Please consider yourself warned!

Ethics statement

I confirm that the Staffordshire University guidelines for ethical approval have been consulted and that all ethical issues and implications in relation to the above assessment have been considered. I confirm that ethical approval need not be sought.

Assessment task

Submit a report on your research project, which is to have utilised primary and secondary research to address a significant applied business issue focused around one of the major business pathway disciplines of HRM, Marketing, Strategy, or Operations management.

Your work must be referenced meticulously and should be word processed. Use your own words wherever possible in completing this assignment. The 4,000 word limit excludes the table of contents, reference list, and appendices.

For your marker’s convenience, please use the Garamond font, size 12, justified text, 1.5 line spacing, 2.54cm margins all round, and either line breaks or indents from paragraph to paragraph.

Your imagined readers are other business researchers, including for instance your teachers. You thus do not need to define terms you use which are explained in the textbook (no ‘quantitative research is …’); do give brief explanations of business theories from other fields (‘the theory of the service profit chain posits that …’).

Your report should contain the following sections (include as subheadings) with the following indicative content (see also pp. 636-643 of the textbook). Each section (except table of contents, reference list, and appendices) should be written as a continuous narrative.

Abstract (150-200w)

  • Place the abstract on the title page.
  • Discuss the aim of your research; the methodology you use; your findings; the limitations & implications for further research; practical implications; and for whom the results are valuable.

Table of Contents

  • Please make sure the table of contents links to the relevant sections.
  • Also list figures and tables.

Background (200-300w)

  • Scope and context of the study.
  • Describe the relevant aspects of the company(ies) you’re investigating.
  • In particular, describe current practice regarding your particular area of research.
  • This background information should implicitly support your claim in the aims below why the project is valuable.

Aims (200-300w)

  • Research question and purpose of research.
  • Briefly state why the project is valuable.
  • Data sets needed to answer question and those needed to control for outside influences.
  • Optionally, your hypothesis. (If you are taking a deductive approach and testing a prediction made by a theory.)

Literature Review (800-1000w)

  • You critically review research which is similar to yours. Since your research is applied, as much of the research you review as possible should be applied too, not theoretical (discussing the latter is likely to lead you down to a descriptive path).
  • You need to discuss at least 6 closely relevant sources in-depth.
  • Group the relevant academic research by theme in their subject matter and/or results.
  • Optionally, add a relevance tree as an appendix.
  • The literature review is not a mini-essay on the topic. Its main point is not to inform the reader about the topic, but to reflect critically on the different conclusions drawn regarding the topic in the academic literature.
  • Improve your literature review by paraphrasing the results as much as possible. Shorten the results and put them more in your own words. Consider what their results tell us about the topic in general, and about your RQ in specific (do not just repeat their results for their specific subjects and research topic, as that is likely not quite what we're interested in).
  • Do not just describe what results these papers present. Of this body of literature as a whole, consider strengths; weaknesses; relevance to your research question; and subject-areas omitted.
  • Just as your methodology will be judged on its suitability for answering the question posed and on its internal, external, and measurement validity, so you can judge the papers you read.
  • Don’t copy the weaknesses directly from the limitations sections of the papers. Consider which of the limitations affect the results in a way which is relevant to people interested in your research question (i.e. your concern is more likely with external validity and generalisability than with internal validity or measurement validity, except where you want to focus on the latter because you will later show that you’ll do something different and better on this point). Discuss those limitations in your own words and again highlight how that influences how we can use / should interpret the results in answering your research question.
  • Refer to specific elements of the papers when you discuss limitations. Not just 'their sampling strategy has some weaknesses', add 'because [specific issues]'.
  • You don't need to discuss all the strengths and weaknesses/limitations of each study. Focus on those strengths and weaknesses which are relevant to the studies' utility in helping answer your research question.
  • End your literature review by briefly explaining how your research will address one of the weaknesses or omissions you identified in the established literature. Clarify why your reader couldn’t answer your research question even if they’d read all the papers in your literature review.
  • lack of critical reflection on the extent to which the results discussed could reliably be applied to your research subjects.

Method (800-1000w)

  • Research method and strategy
    • Quantitative, qualitative, or mixed method?
    • Action research, experiment, survey, ethnography, narrative enquiry, case study, archival research, and/or grounded theory?
  • Sampling strategy
    • Population and target population
    • Census or sample
    • Sampling frame available?
    • Probability or non-probability sampling, and exact sampling technique
    • Sample size
  • Data gathering strategy
    • Interview, Observation, Questionnaire, and/or Secondary Data?
    • Detail on your data gathering design and process.
    • How will you operationalise your variables? E.g. what exactly does employee satisfaction mean in the context of this research, what aspects of it will you measure, using what scales?
    • What data sets from what kind of samples from what target populations using what data gathering techniques?
    • If applicable, what are your independent, dependent, and control variables?
  • Data analysis method(s)
    • Quantitative data: what kinds of statistical analysis will you use, e.g. why linear regression, or multiple linear regression, or …?
    • Qualitative data: inductive or deductive approach? Type of analysis?
  • Throughout the methodology, discuss data quality: how will you ensure the reliability and validity of your data against the threats to quality common to the technique(s) you’ve chosen? At least:
    • External validity (representativeness and generalisability) when you discuss your sampling strategy and the generalisability of your research.
    • Measurement validity when you discuss your data gathering strategy and the operationalisation of your variables.
    • Internal validity when you discuss control variables and when you discuss your data analysis method(s).
  • Don’t just say what you’re going to do.
  • Also how you’re going to do it, i.e. what exact data you’re going to get through what exact questions or observations. (You can refer here to your data collection forms in the appendix, not need for repetition).
  • And why, how the data sets you gather will combine exactly to give you the answer to your research question.
  • Throughout the methodology, justify the choices you make; why are they the best decisions for your research project? Either do so through your own reasoning (making use of the relevant concepts from the textbook) or by showing that the same methods & instruments were used in other research (arguing for sufficient similarity of the projects).
  • The material from week 8, both PPT and hand-out, discusses coherence in your methodology in detail. Apply these questions and exercises to your own methodology.

Findings (400-600w)

  • Present, in some logical order, the results of your data analysis as they bear on your research aim.
  • Analyse quantitative data using the inferential statistics you learned last semester, i.e. linear regression and/or test of difference in means. Merely displaying the data in pie charts and such does not allow you to draw inferences, as required by the evaluative or explanatory purpose of your research, and will cause you to fail both this section and the next.
  • When using statistics, discuss, where relevant: whether particular variables are significant or not; the co-efficient and/or confidence interval of significant correlations; if multiple independent variables are correlated significantly with the dependent variable, compare the effect size [adjusting (only if necessary) for different ways of notation of values in independent variables by calculating range (lowest and highest value times coefficient) and average effect size (average value times coefficient)]; the percentage of variation explained by your significant variables. Distinguish between core variables which connect to your research question and control variables, discussing them separately.
  • In the methodology, you explained how the different data sets combine to give an answer to your research question. Consider using this as the scaffolding for your discussion of your findings. (But feel free to adopt your structure of choice, more appropriate for your research & topic.)

Limitations (300-400w)

  • Consider the limitations inherent in your research design (‘method’) and how these influence and constrain your findings and conclusions.
  • If you used a questionnaire, discuss the response rate (textbook pp. 281-2) and possible participation bias (p. 397), as well as possible response bias (p. 397).
  • Consider the limitations to your study following from problems in implementation (‘findings’), e.g. access, non-response, sampling, and how these influence and constrain your findings and conclusions.
  • Do not just say a particular problem ‘may’ have influenced the reliability of your data or findings; give me your considered judgement how the findings might have changed, that is to say how we should adjust our priors because we have learned of this limitation (e.g. ‘this potential participation bias means that our X data is likely biased towards Y, which means that the coefficient / significance / confidence interval / … of X might in fact be lower / higher / wider / narrower / …).
  • Showing careful thought and good judgement in this section is an essential part of convincing your audience of the quality and reliability of your research.

Discussion and Recommendations (500-700w)

  • Here you answer your research question (discuss the implications your findings and give your conclusion). Highlight what judgements you’ve made (required by the purpose inherent in your research question) based on your findings.
  • Briefly compare your results to those of others who have done similar research (i.e. papers from the literature review); if the results diverge, give reasoned judgements as to which you think is most likely to be true for your subjects.
  • Based on your RQ answer and the comparison with the literature, you give your recommendations, both for future research and, especially, to the businesses involved. Your recommendations should take into account not just your findings, but also your limitations, which should not be discussed separately, but included as reasons for giving particular recommendations. (E.g. certain limitations might limit your confidence in the validity of a particular finding, which might mean you wouldn’t recommend that that company act on it strongly.)
  • Your recommendations should primarily be based on your findings; make explicit how they are.
  • Secondarily, you might add additional thoughts of your own, or you might add suggestions from secondary literature, to elaborate on a suggestion based on the findings. But be very clear where one changes into the other, and focus primarily on what follows from your findings.

Reference List

  • Include all the works cited in the report.

Appendices

  • Tables and Graphs (only if not inserted in main body and not present in excel sheet).
  • Contact detail(s) of person(s) who gave you permission to gather data in their business(es).
  • Your data collection forms (e.g. questionnaire), with English translation.
  • Your consent form(s), if any.
  • Any other supporting material.
  • Your quantitative data and data analysis results, as a separate Excel file.

Marks Awarded

Abstract, Background, and Aims                                                         10%    

Literature Review                                                                                15%

Methodology                                                                                       25%

Findings                                                                                               20%

Limitations                                                                                          10%

Discussion and Recommendations                                                      15%

Structure, Formatting, Use of English, and Referencing                     5%