Business Research Methods A Practical Approach - (PG 266 - 278)

224 Business Research Methods
sampling
Because so many researchers generalise from results derived from a sample, and do
so in a flawed way, you need to understand the principles of sampling. Whether or
not you intend to use a representative sample, understanding these principles may
protect you from a major cause of untrustworthy conclusions in future research. Some
of the non-representative sampling methods described are appropriate for some types
of business research but hazardous in others.
Sometimes you can obtain data from all the situations or all the people who are relevant
to your issue or question. For example, you might be investigating deliberate strategy
formulation in an organisation where strategy is developed by the six members of the
board. In this case it would be feasible to interview all six board members. Even with
larger numbers you may be able to survey everyone. This ‘100% sample’ is normally
called a census. Sampling may not be an issue at all if, for example, your research is
participative and involves all the ‘actors’ in the situation of interest.
From a constructionist perspective, sampling raises different issues. Take first the
Andy and his sort of sampling you might do when seeking quantitative data with a view to drawing
questionnaire
conclusions about a larger group from which your sample is drawn. For example,
first featured in
in Andy’s change evaluation project, the issue involved more people than he could
Chapter 1
possibly look at. If a census is not feasible, you will need to select a smaller number of
people or objects for study.
Remember, if you want to draw wider conclusions, the data must be representative.
It is important therefore that the sample from which you obtain your data is repre-
sentative of the wider population in which you are interested. Note that in discussions
of sampling, ‘population’ has a specialist meaning. It refers to the whole group from
which the sample is drawn – that is, the group (people, items, instances, etc) to which
you wish your conclusions to relate. Thus if you wanted to draw conclusions relevant
to all of an organisation’s 500 retail locations but had the resources to investigate only
25, unless all 500 were very similar indeed you would need to choose those 25 very
carefully.
constructing a representative sample

There are several different approaches to sampling, and this section considers the main
ones and their relative strengths and weaknesses. You will not be surprised that there
is, as ever, a trade-off to be made between costs (in the broad sense) and the strength
of the evidence generated – and therefore the potential value of the conclusions you
Copyright © 2009. CIPD. All rights reserved.
will be able to draw.

Andy was collecting primarily quantitative data. Do you remember my reservations
These
about Andy’s sample? He was interested in the impact of change on a whole organi-
reservations
sation, so he was sampling from a population which consisted of every employee in
were described in
his organisation. He could not collect data from everyone, so he focused on what
Chapter 1
was feasible. Liz was supporting his project and agreed for Andy to email 500 people
in three departments. Some 20 emails bounced because staff had left; only 40 of the
questionnaires were returned.
Chris’s project
first featured in Chris was collecting qualitative data. He was interested in leadership development
Chapter 1 in general, but there was no way he could interview everyone involved in delivering
Sheila, C, & Deborah, P 2009, Business Research Methods : A Practical Approach, CIPD, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [28 December 2017].
Created from gcal on 2017-12-28 13:45:25.
chapter 9: Data, Evidence and Sampling 225
leadership training. For practical reasons he could only interview a relatively small
number of people. He was working to a dissertation deadline. It was taking a lot of
phone calls to get people to agree to be interviewed. By the time he had obtained
agreement from 17 he reckoned that he had to start interviewing. It would simply have
to be enough.
consider...
How adequate were Andy and Chris’s samples, and why? What would that mean for the conclusions they might
draw?
Both Andy and Chris were interested in an issue that went wider than the sample from
Randomness which they collected data. Andy was ‘allowed’ a particular sample by a stakeholder
Chapter 21
with an interest in an answer which made the change look good. Perhaps things had
gone relatively well in the departments offered for survey. Non-randomness is a major
threat to representativeness. A further threat came from his low response rate – 40 out
of 500 is a tiny proportion and again the choice to reply or not is non-random. As a
proportion of the many thousands working for the organisation, 40 is invisibly small. I
would argue that any conclusions drawn about the impact of the change on the organi-
sation as a whole would be totally invalid because of the inadequacy of the sample.
Chris’s questions similarly related to a very large population, and I would argue
were unanswerable within the constraints of a dissertation. His selection was equally
non-random. He ‘selected’ interviewees via contacts he had, which may already have
been biased. Further ‘selection’ took place when they decided whether to be inter-
viewed about reflection and leadership development: their decision may have been
influenced by their interest in reflection. On that level his sample was as inadequate
as Andy’s.
But Chris had a personal purpose: to gain a deeper understanding of the role of
leadership development. Although he may have failed to answer the research questions
he posed, he did achieve this learning purpose, and gathered information that was of
interest to a wider group, despite its limitations. As a study directed towards gener-
ating insight, carried out, as was noted earlier, in a flexible way, the sample had fewer
limitations. This shows how you must always judge methods and design in terms of
purpose, and may have to choose a purpose according to what is feasible, as well as
what is interesting.
consider...
If it is necessary to work with a representative sample, how might you go about selecting it?
Listed below are the stages you would have to go through to define your sample for a
study in which you are seeking to generalise your findings to a wider population. You
will note that there are three key decisions: the population, the size you need, and the
method you will apply.
Stage 1: Define the population

Stage 2: Decide on the sample size
Stage 3: Decide on the sampling method
Stage 4: Apply the method.
The first step is to identify the population in which you are interested. This will depend
This upon your research purpose and research questions. If your aim is to answer a question
investigation
about organisations within a specific industry, then the population from which you
featured in Chapter 2
sampled would include every organisation within that industry. If you wanted to know
about the 11 organisations in Barcelona using the information system being investi-
gated, those 11 organisations constitute your sample. You would then need to sample
individuals within those organisations if you wanted data from individuals rather than
from organisational records. Once you have established your aim, and therefore the
relevant population, you can start to think about how to select a representative sample,
and consider how big this sample needs to be.
sample size
Electronic
questionnaires For quantitative research, bigger is usually better . . . up to a certain point. But for many
Chapter 15 methods there tend to be costs attached to a bigger sample. (Electronic questionnaires
are something of an exception.) It would be wonderful to be able to give you a rule of
thumb by which you could decide how big was big enough. Sadly, it is more compli-
cated. The size of sample you require will depend upon the degree of variation in your
population, the sort of analysis you intend to carry out, and the type and ‘strength’ of
the conclusions you are seeking.
At an exploratory stage, you might be happy with a smallish sample. If you are sampling
for your main research and aim to draw convincing conclusions to inform significant,
possibly irreversible, action, you will be much more worried about the adequacy of
your sample. If it is impossible to say what is ‘big enough’, can we say what we mean
by ‘big’?
Bryman (2001, p95), talking about social survey work, says that ‘as the sample size
climbs from low figures of 50, 100, 150 and so on’, precision increases. This is the case
until somewhere around 1,000, when the gains become very much less. It is absolute
size that is important, not the proportion of the parent population that it represents.
Thus you could be as happy about conclusions based on data from 1,000 Icelanders as
from 1,000 Chinese.
This looks frightening: few practical researchers like the idea of analysing 1,000
questionnaires. Many novice researchers would regard 100 as a fairly large sample,
even for a survey. But these numbers show that you may have to be somewhat circum-
spect in the conclusions you draw from smaller samples. If you plan to do statistical
Statistical
analyses, the significance of your findings will depend heavily upon your sample size.
analyses and
If you want to split your sample in order to make comparisons between subgroups, you
sample sizes Chapter 21
may end up with some very small categories if your overall sample is not very large,
and any differences you find will be less likely to be statistically significant as a result.
response rates
In deciding how big a sample you need it is important to allow for those who do not
reply or refuse to take part. Interviewees may cancel at the last minute. Some of your
research sites may close during the study. And you can almost guarantee that not
everyone who receives an email questionnaire will return it. With a long-term study,
people move away or otherwise lose contact. So your initial sample size has to allow
for likely dropout: your conclusions will be based upon the data you actually get, not
on what you hoped for. The response rate is the proportion of those whom you contact
who actually take part.
The percentage response rate for a questionnaire is calculated as:
Number of usable questionnaire responses you receive back

________________________________________________ 100
Number of suitable people who received questionnaires
A low response rate reduces the size of your eventual sample, and it can threaten its
representativeness. It is fairly easy to cope with the impact on size, provided you plan
for this, by starting with a bigger sample than you need. For example, if you expect
50% of questionnaires to be returned, you would send out twice as many as you want
to get back. If it is hard to estimate the likely response rate, send out as many question-
naires as you can afford. You do not have to analyse them all provided you sample
carefully (normally randomly) from those you receive.
The influence of low response rates on representativeness is more subtle and harder to
handle. The decision to respond may be non-random, and influenced by the factors
you are interested in. The smaller the response rate, the more you should worry about
this.
This is why the number you put in as the bottom line (the denominator) of the
percentage fraction above will usually be slightly smaller than the size of the sample
you selected. It must exclude those who had no choice (for example, questionnaires
returned as undeliverable) and any responses that you excluded for some reason. (For
example, if you were looking at the difference in pay before and after a part-time MBA,
you might exclude those who said they had not worked before the course.)
Response rates for questionnaires are often around 30–50%, although many factors
can influence this rate. Rates tend to be higher if the people know you or know of you,
know why you want the data, share your goals, trust you to observe confidentiality,
There is more etc, and if they find the questionnaire interesting, not too long, and relatively easy
on influencing to answer. You can do a lot to increase rates by contacting people in advance, by the
response rates in
quality of that contact, and by having the support of respected seniors in the organi-
Chapter 15
sation where appropriate.
The way you approach your sample may strongly influence response rates.
Other methods may have higher response rates, but you would still want to consider
the impact of any dropout on the representativeness of your eventual sample. For
example, of the 17 consultant/trainers who agreed to be interviewed by Chris, none
dropped out. But he had to make a lot of phone calls to get those 17 people to agree to
be interviewed. If those who refused were not interested in reflection, whereas those
who accepted did so precisely because they were, any conclusions about the ‘extent to
which practices were in line with Avolio . . .’ (tenuous at best with a sample this size)
would be worthless.
If you deliberately chose a stratified sample (see below), it might be worth checking
whether the make-up of respondents matches that which you intended. Thus if you
chose a sample with 50 men and 50 women because the workforce as a whole had
an even gender mix, you would be worried if 19 of the 20 replies you got were from
women. Instead of drawing conclusions about the whole workforce, you might have to
limit your conclusions to women employees. You would need to think carefully about
the implications of any lack of representativeness in your respondents.
convenience sampling
Chris was using what is a widespread approach to sampling: selection according to
convenience. For some purposes this is fine. You might use the people nearest to you
to check whether the factors you are considering seem relevant to them, or use them as
your first guinea-pigs in the early stages of designing a questionnaire. But a convenience
sample is unlikely to be at all representative of a larger population: the characteristics
that make people ‘convenient’ might also make them unrepresentative. If you intend
to generalise to a larger population, using a convenience sample to generate data might
be as productive as drunk’s search for his keys under the lamp-post.
Consider Chris’s interviews with 17 trainers and sponsors of training. When I asked
him what, with hindsight, he would have done differently in his research, he replied
that one of the things would be the way in which he sampled. What he actually said
was:
research story continued
Reflection and leadership development
‘My selection of interviewees was, in a sense, years later] I am aware of sources from which I
“opportunistic”. Given that I had no guarantee of could construct a much more representative sample
access to any organisations, however, and had set (by industry sector, organisation size, turnover,
myself against the clock to meet the first deadline employees, etc).’
for submission, I felt I had little choice. Now [two
Chris’s key findings, drawn from his interviews with this ‘opportunistic’ sample, were
carefully phrased. He found that varying degrees of reflection were built into all the
programmes his interviewees were involved with, to some extent at least, but improved
reflection was an explicit outcome for less than half of the programmes concerned.
The ability to reflect was never assessed subsequent to the programme. He concluded
that this suggested that there was scope to increase the effectiveness of leadership
programmes by paying more attention to developing and supporting reflective skills
during and after the programme.
consider...
Do you think Chris would have had more confidence in his conclusions if he had sampled more systematically?
It might not have helped at all. Chris did not have time for more interviews. Interviewees
were from a range of leading training providers, with some geographic spread in their
UK location, and with worldwide coverage in terms of course participants. Any attempt
at ‘greater representativeness’ would have increased the time (and cost) required to
arrange interviews. A sample of 17 is so small in relation to the population he is inter-
ested in that it is hard to see how it could be much more representative than it was, nor
allow stronger conclusions than he drew.
The research would be a useful starting point for further research, perhaps with a
different method that allowed a larger sample, or with a narrower focus aiming for
representativeness within a much smaller population. I would argue that it was the
research questions that were the main problem: they were not appropriate to the
resources available. The sample would have been fine for a more exploratory purpose,
and this might have been more realistic.
snowball sampling
A variant of convenience sampling is called ‘snowball sampling’ by analogy to the
way in which a snowball picks up more and more snow as it rolls downhill. In this
approach you ask each interviewee to suggest other informants. This allows you to
identify relevant people previously unknown to you. And if your interviewee ‘recom-
mends’ you, it may increase the new person’s willingness to take part in your study. You
can see that if each interviewee recommended several others, your ‘snowball’ could
grow quite quickly.
Snowballing is fairly common in social research (see Bryman, 1999), and has a number
of advantages for some studies. For example, there may be networks that researchers
are not part of, and where trust is important. A researcher investigating aspects of drug
abuse, say, might find this method extremely useful. It might also be appropriate in a
study like the Barcelona IOIS project. As researchers developed their ideas about what
they wanted to know, respondents might be able to suggest appropriate informants.
Snowballing is, however, highly unrepresentative. It will severely limit the conclusions
you can draw about any wider population. But it has its uses in other types of business
research. Suppose that Chris had been more interested in finding examples of how
reflective skills were being successfully developed in some leadership programmes,
rather than of whether they were. Most of the people he interviewed were paying very
little attention to developing reflective skills. But for a few it was really important. They
might have been able to put Chris in contact with others who shared their enthusiasm
for reflection. I myself met Chris through my own interest in reflection. Networking is
largely about finding common interests, and ‘snowballing’ can use this.
Like other forms of convenience sampling, snowballing has major limitations, particu-
larly in terms of its representativeness. But like them it also has its uses. Rather than
rejecting convenience sampling altogether, make sure that you are aware of its limita-
tions, and use it only when the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Remember, too,
to be extremely careful not to make claims or draw conclusions that your data does
not support.
random probability sampling

The most obvious way to go about obtaining a representative sample is to pick sample
members at random from your population. This is the classic sampling strategy for
scientific experimental design. By ‘random’ I mean that it is pure chance that deter-
mines which members are sampled: each member of the population has an equal
probability of being selected. If this is done, there is no reason why the sample should
be different from the population from which it is drawn. The challenge is to ensure that
your sample is random.
consider...
An organisation has a list of its employees in alphabetical order. Would sampling everyone whose surname
starts with one of two randomly-chosen letters be random?
If you have a list of employees ordered by staff number, would it be random to take the first 100?
What about using a list of random numbers to select from these staff numbers?
The problem with using random initial letters is that certain surnames are much more
common in some parts of the world than others. Thus depending upon the letters you
chose, you might obtain a disproportionate number of people from certain cultural
backgrounds. If their background was likely to have some influence on the data you
obtained from them, your sample would then not be representative of the employees
as a whole.
Similarly, staff numbers are seldom allocated at random. Longer-serving staff might
have lower numbers. If so, taking the first numbers on the list might mean that you
ended up with a highly unrepresentative sample made up of all the longest-serving
employees. Some sets of numbers might be allocated to specific categories of staff.
Again, taking the first 10% could seriously skew your sample. These examples suggest
that you must think carefully when you are sampling ‘at random’ to ensure that your
sample is genuinely random.
Fortunately, random number tables are readily available in statistics books or on the
Web to help you to select at random. Arm yourself with such a table. The procedure is
then fairly simple (this method is often called simple random sampling).
Guidelines for using random number tables

• Define the population. What is the set of people or other objects about whom/which you want to draw
conclusions? List them. This constitutes your sampling frame.

• Allocate a number to every member of your target population. Random number tables tend to have five
digits, but you can choose to use only the first or last two or three digits if that provides a large enough
number to cover your population. Stick to whichever rule you decide on.
• Take your table and stick in a pin at random. Use the number you land on as your starting point and move
systematically through the table. (You can go up, down, or sideways, but again, stick to whatever method
you choose.)
• Pick the population member whose number corresponds to the random number you have landed on. If
there is no match, move on to the next number until there is. Repeat until you have a sample of the size
you want.
consider...
What reasons might there be to prefer a non-random approach to sampling?
You can see that although random sampling is an excellent approach, it can be fairly
laborious in practice, particularly for a large population. It is not surprising that many
researchers prefer the ‘convenience’ method precisely because it is so much more
convenient.
The other problem is the very randomness of the process. Chance is a funny thing.
Suppose you had a bag with 100 balls in it, 20 of them black, the rest white. You put
your hand in the bag, and without being able to see what you are doing, pull out 10
balls. There is a high probability that you will get mostly white balls. But sometimes,
simply by chance you would get 10 black balls.
This ‘sample’, resulting from a random probability approach, would be highly unrep-
resentative of the set of balls as a whole. Similarly, random probability sampling of
employees could, even if you use random number tables, produce highly unrepre-
sentative samples. You could still (very occasionally) end up with the 25 longest-serving
employees in your sample. The possibility of such sampling error has to be taken into
consideration when working out what your data means. It will be addressed in Chapter
20: inferential statistical techniques have been developed to cope with precisely this.
stratified random sampling

One way around this is to use a stratified method. If you want your sample to ‘represent’
certain aspects of the population, you can pre-allocate the appropriate proportions
of your sample to individual categories and then sample randomly within those
categories. Suppose gender and length of service were important to you. If, say, 70% of
employees were female and 50% had worked for two years or less, you might decide to
sample randomly from each of the categories in the proportions shown in Table 9.2.
The numbers show how many would sample in each category for a sample of 400.
Table 9.2 An example of a

Female Male
stratified sample
up to two years’ service: 35% up to two years’ service: 15%
sample therefore 140 sample 140 sample therefore 60 sample 60
more than two years’ service: 35% more than two years’ service: 15%
sample therefore 140 sample 140 sample therefore 60 sample 60
This is a greatly simplified example, there only to give you a feel for how it works. If
you sampled this way, your sample would better represent gender and length of service
than a simple random sample. The downside is, of course, that it is more hassle, but in
many cases it will be well worth it. Your findings will be more representative and your
conclusions more credible as a result. However, you may have to remember that this is
not a ‘true’ random sample when you are doing statistical analysis, because statistical
tests tend to assume that your sample is random.
cluster (or multistage) sampling

Selecting from the whole population can be a laborious operation. Allocating numbers
to thousands of people, or even working through existing numbered staff lists, may not
be feasible. Even if you can do it, there may be logistical issues. If you are emailing or
phoning, it may not matter where those you select for your sample are located. But if
you need to travel to interview or observe, then the scattergun approach of either of
the above methods may produce a widely dispersed sample that you cannot afford the
time or money to visit. Cluster sampling addresses both these problems.
You select in a series of stages – how many will depend upon the nature of your inves-
tigation. At each stage the selection would be random. Thus to sample from a large
organisation, you might select perhaps 10 of the 200 sites (if visiting were an issue,
you might need to choose fewer). Within each site you might randomly select one
department from the six. Within each department you might randomly select 20 staff.
This would give you a sample of 200, and the laborious part of selecting from staff lists
would be manageable. You would need 10 listings, and each might have no more than
100 staff listed. Furthermore, you would be dealing with only 10 locations if you had
to visit to collect data.
Cluster sampling has more stages at which sampling error can creep in. But it is far
more likely to produce a representative sample, and hence credible conclusions, than
the convenience method.
theoretical sampling
If your aim is to use your sample to learn about a wider population, representativeness
of the sample is important, and random probability sampling is frequently the best
approach. However, if you are not a positivist, you may doubt the very possibility
of such generalisations, and take a deliberately non-random approach to sampling.
Theoretical sampling is one such approach, and lies at the core of the inductive
Grounded Theory approach. Indeed, it is so central to that method that it is discussed
in detail in Chapter 18 rather than here. I mention it here only to remind you that your
Epistemology epistemology may lead you to a very different approach to sampling: from a construc-
Chapters 2 and 3 tionist perspective you might choose sample members most likely to add information
to what you already have, rather than at random. And you might stop when new
informants are adding little new information, rather than because you have reached
a specific and predetermined sample size. (Note: do not attempt theoretical sampling
without reading Chapter 18 for the full method.)
Key points
O You will often need to obtain data from a sample of the population in which you are interested.
O If you intend to generalise from your sample, the sample must be representative of the
population of interest.
O It needs to also be big enough for you to have confidence in your conclusions.
O Common sampling methods include convenience, snowball, random and stratified sampling.
O A cluster or multistage approach to random sampling may increase efficiency.
O Some sampling is driven by informational potential rather than a desire for representativeness.
drawing conclusions from data
You collect data to help you answer your research question. If your data is reliable,
valid and representative, or you are aware of its limitations, what more is required to
enable you to draw valid conclusions? For practical research it is vital that conclusions
do not mislead: they can inform major organisational decisions.
Later chapters look at analysis and conclusions in more detail. Here I want to give only
Analysis and enough of an overview for planning purposes. You cannot think sensibly about what
conclusions
data you need unless you understand how you are going to use it to form an argument
Chapters 18 to 22
to support conclusions. ‘Argument’ is used here as understood by logicians rather than
in its everyday domestic ‘Yes you did!’, ‘No, I didn’t!’ sense.
A conclusion is a view that you come to on the strength of your data. You want others to
agree with this view. You therefore need to construct an argument to persuade stake-
holders to accept it. It is important that:
O It is clear where the conclusions come from.
O They are substantial – and substantiated.
O They are focused on the research question.
O They take into consideration all the relevant data.
O They make clear the degree of confidence that should be placed in them.
making claims
An argument starts with a claim or contention – something you assert to be ‘true’. An
argument is made up of the claim and the reasons for making it. These reasons will be
a combination of evidence and reasoning. The conclusion in the following story is an
example of a claim: indeed, it actually contains a number of claims.
research story
Student engagement
This is an on-going exploration of the issues of We looked at student reports on their final
‘student engagement’ on an MBA. We are interested investigations and tutors’ comments on these
in whether a change in approach to teaching might and the marks received, and at online discussions
allow students to ‘engage’ better with what they between tutors and students, and between students
learned and their own practice, and as a result do a themselves. We also analysed assignment questions
better practical research project, and become more for all MBA courses.
effective managers.
As a result we concluded the following:
We have read many published reports in journals
We need to move the emphasis in teaching
on management learning dealing with aspects of
and assessment from teaching ‘theory’
professional and practice-based learning including
as if its content is paramount towards an
management teaching.
emphasis on helping managers select and
We conducted a number of focus groups with tutors, use theory to improve their ways of thinking
students and alumni, and discussed the significance and their professional practice: this is our
of findings from these with key groups of relevant real goal.
academics. Selected groups of tutors worked online
to explore the issue from their perspective.
Some academic colleagues are likely to be highly sceptical of this conclusion. Imagine
that you were helping me to construct a case to convince them. A useful first step is to
analyse the conclusion.
consider...
Look at the conclusion above. What are the claims it is making, and how might a sceptic reject them?
This conclusion is no more complicated than many of the ‘claims’ made in business
research reports, but when you start to analyse it you can see that there are surprisingly
many claims made in this single statement. Some are implicit, some explicit. I have
listed eight, although you may see more.
O We currently teach theory as if content were paramount.
O The content of theory is not paramount.
O This is not how we should be teaching.
O The role of theory is to help managers think better.
O Theory-informed thinking leads to better management practice.
O We should be teaching managers to use theory to think better.
O We should be teaching managers to select appropriate theory.
O The real goal of management teaching is to improve management practice.
The following illustration shows how these claims might be refuted. The responses are
a mix of counter-claims, claims to something different, and questioning of my right to
claim. Some of the counter-claims include a supporting argument, some imply one.
There are also some other responses. It might be tempting to dismiss some of the
responses as ‘rubbish’, but these are all stakeholders and they can influence the success
of subsequent action. Remember the pragmatist position, that different ‘doubters’ may
require different evidence to be convinced.
research story continued
Claims, counter-claims and other responses
The following shows some of the actual (and – Who are you to tell me how I should be
potential) responses to the claims above. teaching?

– Yes, it is how we should be teaching: it is what
We currently teach theory as if content were
business schools do.
paramount.
– Yes, it is. I have always taught this way and I
– No, we don’t: we insist that students apply get really high pass rates.
theory. – Yes, it is. I have always taught this way and
students are happy.
The content of theory is not paramount.
The role of theory is to help managers think better.
– But it is. If students don’t know the theory,
they don’t deserve an MBA! – Come on! All the research shows that managers
don’t have time to think.
This is not how we should be teaching. – The role of theory is to help increase knowledge.
Theory-informed thinking leads to better – No, we shouldn’t. See my earlier answers.

management practice. – This isn’t something you can teach.
– How do you know this? The real goal of management teaching is to improve
management practice.
We should be teaching managers to use theory to
think better. – No, it isn’t. The real goal is education.
– No, it isn’t. I’m not here to prop up the
– We do already.
capitalist system.
– It isn’t my job to teach managers to think. They
– What do you mean ‘improve’?
are managers and graduates, and so should be
able to do that already.
– This isn’t the role of theory.
We should be teaching managers to select

appropriate theory.
– If they know it properly, they’ll know when to

use it.
You can see how a seemingly simple conclusion includes a great many claims, each
of which offers scope for disagreement. Some of these ‘refutations’ may miss the
point, from my perspective. Some may seem illogical. Some are important questions
deserving an answer. I’ll leave it to you to classify them, if you wish. But if you want
to build an argument that will make your claims stick, you must go through a similar
process of anticipating such reactions. This will help you to identify the data and
arguments that will pre-empt such reactions. If you do this, your conclusions will be
convincing and credible.
checking claims
The above exercise should have shown the need for thinking carefully about the claims
you make. The first thing to check is that a claim is necessary. All claims could be
challenged, and by refuting one claim, your client is likely to think they have destroyed
your entire argument. It therefore makes sense to exclude any claims that are not
essential for your argument. For example, the final claim above did not have to be
stated so strongly.
The claim that anything is ‘the real goal’ of teaching is almost impossible to justify.
This point is particularly important because without some agreement about goals,
agreement on the best way of achieving them is highly unlikely. There is little hope of
gaining agreement to the ‘real purpose’, particularly as views are likely to be influenced
by values, which are notoriously resistant to logic. However, a weaker claim along the
lines that ‘one purpose’ or ‘one potential valuable benefit’ of management teaching is
improved professional and/or organisational practice would be far less contentious.
Make only claims that are necessary to your conclusions.
Relevant potential evidence to support this weaker claim might include published
research on management teaching (likely to be acceptable to an academic audience),
primary and secondary data from our own past and current students about reasons for
study, and surveys carried out elsewhere.
As well as claiming only what is necessary, and what you can justify, you must separate
important but unrelated claims so that any doubts about one do not affect the others.
constructing an argument
Once you have thought carefully about the claims you wish to make, you can proceed
to build an argument. To construct an argument to support a claim or contention you
need evidence to support the claim, and reasoning to link the evidence to the claim.
There are different sorts of logical links that you can use. Call your claim C and your
evidence E. These links might then be in the form:
E proves C.
E suggests that C is likely.
E is consistent with C.
E is inconsistent with C.
E suggests that C is unlikely.
E disproves C.
These terms must be used with caution. ‘Proof ’ and ‘disproof ’ are fairly rare in practical
business research. Very few things in business research can be ‘proved’ or ‘disproved’:
you are far more likely to be using links related to consistency or suggestion. It is
important that your conclusions do not claim more than the strength of the links
warrants. Note that although consistency is a weaker link than suggestion, incon-
sistency may seem a stronger one than a suggestion to the contrary. However, when
you are dealing with weak indicators, inconsistency is not uncommon.
Correlation does not imply causality

One particular hazard here relates to the difference between association and causality.
Correlation Take a typical business research project quoted by Saunders et al (2003) on appraisal.
Chapter 21 Their student found that a poor performance appraisal rating was associated with
negative feelings about the appraisal process. She could not tell from this finding
alone whether a poor attitude to appraisal led to a poor rating, or a poor rating led to
negative feelings about the process which generated it. Indeed, the appraisee might
have felt negative about everything to do with the organisation, as a result of which
he both performed poorly (generating a poor performance rating) and felt as negative
about appraisal as he did about everything else at work. The association observed is
consistent with a claim that poor attitude causes a poor appraisal, but does not by itself
even suggest this causality.

You must also be particularly careful about the logical links you make when your
evidence is derived from indicators rather than measures. Indicators may provide only
weak evidence, consistency rather than suggestion, perhaps.
Mapping arguments
A simple argument consists of a single claim and supporting evidence. In a complex
argument you may have evidence supporting a sub-claim which is itself evidence for
a higher claim. (The claims identified above support the main conclusion.) You may
need several layers of sub-claims.

Business Research Methods A Practical Approach - (PG 266 - 278)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Business Research Methods A Practical Approach - (PG 266 - 278)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

224 Business Research Methods

constructing a representative sample

will be able to draw.

Stage 1: Define the population

Number of usable questionnaire responses you receive back

research story continued

Reflection and leadership development

random probability sampling

Guidelines for using random number tables

conclusions? List them. This constitutes your sampling frame.

What reasons might there be to prefer a non-random approach to sampling?

stratified random sampling

Table 9.2 An example of a

sample therefore 140 sample 140 sample therefore 60 sample 60

cluster (or multistage) sampling

drawing conclusions from data

research story continued

Claims, counter-claims and other responses

potential) responses to the claims above. teaching?

Theory-informed thinking leads to better – No, we shouldn’t. See my earlier answers.

We should be teaching managers to select

– If they know it properly, they’ll know when to

Make only claims that are necessary to your conclusions.

Correlation does not imply causality

even suggest this causality.

You might also like