Research Methods

Written Individual Assignment.
This constitutes 100% of the total unit mark
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 submission deadline for your work is: 12 noon on 20 th May 2016
The individual assignment should be divided into 4 parts and its structure should be similar to an
academic quantitative journal article. You will be able to complete one part after each lecture designated
to topic relating to data collection and analysis (i.e. Days 3, 4, and 5).
Part 1: Construct a questionnaire.
This part should follow from your group presentation where you already reviewed and
discussed the relevant literature to outline relevant concepts that are of interest to you.
More specifically this part should include a very brief background to your research, a very brief review of
literature to outline relevant concepts. It should lead into an outline of your research questions or/and
hypotheses.
Part 2: Data collection
This part is the core methodology hence it should show how you constructed your
questionnaire (why those questions – relate to your Part 1), your sampling strategy, data
collection procedures and how you imputed loaded the data into SPSS
Part 3: Data analysis
3
This part is the continuation of Part 2 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 Part 1 (i.e. what research questions you wanted to answer).
Part 4: Discussion
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 collecting 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. You can have your class mates 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 3,000 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, I am not looking for the perfect research, but for you to identify how you undertook
the research project with regards to data design, collection and analysis.
If applicable, please make sure to complete an ethics checklist before you undertake your
research.

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