Chapter 1: Foundations of research methods
1.1 The research enterprise
Research: a type of systematic investigation that is empirical in nature and is designed to contribute
to public knowledge.
Research enterprise: the macro-level effort to accumulate knowledge across multiple empirical
systematic public research projects. So the broader effect of research. After hundreds of years of
conducting individual research studies and then series of studies, we are finally turning our attention
to the broader environment within which all this activity takes place.
How is knowledge from research different from knowledge derived from experience, or experts, or
intuition, or trial and error?
We try to connect all the ideas with observations, pit reality with our ideas of reality. Within the
social sciences we can know nothing for sure. There is no proof for a theory. It’s a mathematical
concept, but you cannot show that a certain individual would always behave in a certain way. We try
to identify trends.
We are constantly facing the problem of looking at the result of a small research and how can we
apply this on everything. We can never study the entire population. Researches are not often explicit
about the population. You cannot generalize research, for example if you study employees in the
Netherlands this would not be the same for employees in another country.
All research is limited and we can know nothing for sure. Research is:
- Purposeful
- Systematic
- Empirical (engages with reality)
- Public effort (sometimes behind a paywall)
- Cumulative (research built up)
- Critical of itself
Nature of business and management research:
- Transdisciplinary: a certain amount of disciplines.
- Double hurdle: theoretical and practical impact. Challenging: contributing to how people
function but also helping the company to better function the people.
- Science –practice gap/translational research: hard to find respondents: there is a gap
between the practice and research world.
- Evidence based management: to facilitate the managerial decisions based on evidence.
Currently managers still strongly go for their own intuition. I know this company/job; my
judgement is better.
1
,Translational research: moving research to practice in our daily lives. It’s the systematic effort to
move research from initial discovery to practice and ultimately to impact our lives. It takes a lot of
time for these theory’s to filter into practice.
Research-practice continuum: the process of moving from an initial research idea or discovery to
practice, and the potential for the idea to influence our lives or world. The research practice
continuum assumes that different discoveries take different pathways trough the continuum. The
translation process works in both directions.
Difference between basic and applied research: Basic/fundamental research is conducted
(uitgevoerd) to satisfy curiosity, applied research is focused on finding answers on real-life problems
in organizations.
- Basic research: research that is designed to generate discoveries and to understand how the
discoveries work.
- Applied research: research where a discovery is tested under increasingly controlled
conditions in real-world contexts. Discoveries related to humans.
- Implementation and dissemination research: research that assesses how well an innovation
or discovery can be distributed in and carried out in a broad range of contexts that extend
beyond the original controlled studies.
- Policy research: designed to investigate existing policies (beleid) or develop and test new
ones.
- Impact research: assesses the broader effects of a discovery or innovation on society.
Expected that system for synthesizing large numbers of research studies will become the normative
way that research about new discoveries moves from the basic-applied stage to implementation and
2
,dissemination (verspreiding) in broader context.
During the testing of new discovery during the basic and applied research period, a number of
separate research projects are likely to be conducted. It’s a good idea to check the research
synthesis this is a systematic study of multiple prior research projects that addresses the same
research questions/topics. The synthesis summarizes the results in a way that can be used by
practitioners.
! There are two types of research synthesis:
1. Meta-analysis: uses statistical methods to combine the results of similar studies quantitatively in
order to allow general conclusions to be made. A type of systematic review. You can try to
summarize all the studies. Meta analysis based on a large sample, so it’s trusted.
2. Systematic review: focuses on a specific question or issue and uses specific preplanned methods
to identify, select, assess, and summarize the findings of multiple research studies. Stronger
conclusions than a single study. Can be a panel of experts who discuss the research literature.
The disadvantage is that this can be written in a scientific style, which makes it hard to use. To
provide this, the guideline is a useful mechanism: a systematic process that leads to a specific set of
research-based recommendations for practice that usually includes some estimates of how strong
the evidence is for each recommendation. See figure above, includes guidelines.
Evidence-based practice (EBP): movement designed to encourage or require practitioners to employ
practices that are based on research evidence as reflected in research syntheses or practice
guidelines. Better integration of research and practice. First in medicine (1997).
Society became more aware of dominance of research, we think differently about research
enterprise; as evolutionary system. Based on evolutionary epistemology: branch of philosophy that
holds that ideas evolve through the process of natural selection.
1.2 Conceptualizing research
One of most difficult aspects is how to develop the idea for a research project.
- Practical problems in the field;
- Literature in your specific field. Requests For Proposals (RFPs): document issued by a
government agency or other organization that, typically, describes the problem that needs
addressing, the contexts in which it operates, the approach the agency would like you to
take to investigate the problem, and the amount the agency would be willing to pay for
such research.
- Think up their research topic on their own. Influenced by background, culture etc.
One of the most important early steps in a research project is the conducting of the literature
review: systematic compilation and written summary of all of the literature published in scientific
journals that is related to a research topic of interest. A literature review is typically included in the
introduction section of a research write-up.
- Concentrate your efforts on the research literature, determine what the most credible
research journals are and start there. Check if it’s peer-reviewed, most of the time the
credibility is higher.
- Do the review early in the research process.
- Begin to think about whether the study is feasible (haalbaar) at all. Considerations; trade-
offs between rigor and practicality.
- Think about how long the research will take.
- Think about ethical constraints.
- Determine whether you can acquire the cooperation needed to take the project to its
3
, successful conclusion.
- Determine the degree to which costs will be manageable.
The peer review process
• Final check of manuscript quality yet no guarantee.
• Political (try finding qualitative research articles or research
in which hypotheses are not supported).
• Journals can afford to be more critical and selective when
they have higher impact.
Example reviewer comments…
• It is safe to say that the authors want to see their paper
published more than I really want to reject it.
• The work is trivial, and there is no novelty in the work, the
approach or the results. The authors do not solve anything
and the implications in this context are quite possibly
irrelevant.
• Such a prestigious journal can surely make better use of its
limited space.
1.3 The language of research
Terms that help describe key aspects of contemporary (hedendaags) social research:
- Theoretical: research is theoretical, meaning that much of it is concerned with developing,
exploring, or testing the theories or ideas that social researchers have about how the world
operates.
- Empirical: based on direct observations and measurements of reality.
- Probabilistic: based on probabilities.
- Causal: pertaining to a cause-effect relationship, hypothesis or relationship. Something is
causal if it leads to an outcome or makes an outcome happen causal relationship.
4
1.1 The research enterprise
Research: a type of systematic investigation that is empirical in nature and is designed to contribute
to public knowledge.
Research enterprise: the macro-level effort to accumulate knowledge across multiple empirical
systematic public research projects. So the broader effect of research. After hundreds of years of
conducting individual research studies and then series of studies, we are finally turning our attention
to the broader environment within which all this activity takes place.
How is knowledge from research different from knowledge derived from experience, or experts, or
intuition, or trial and error?
We try to connect all the ideas with observations, pit reality with our ideas of reality. Within the
social sciences we can know nothing for sure. There is no proof for a theory. It’s a mathematical
concept, but you cannot show that a certain individual would always behave in a certain way. We try
to identify trends.
We are constantly facing the problem of looking at the result of a small research and how can we
apply this on everything. We can never study the entire population. Researches are not often explicit
about the population. You cannot generalize research, for example if you study employees in the
Netherlands this would not be the same for employees in another country.
All research is limited and we can know nothing for sure. Research is:
- Purposeful
- Systematic
- Empirical (engages with reality)
- Public effort (sometimes behind a paywall)
- Cumulative (research built up)
- Critical of itself
Nature of business and management research:
- Transdisciplinary: a certain amount of disciplines.
- Double hurdle: theoretical and practical impact. Challenging: contributing to how people
function but also helping the company to better function the people.
- Science –practice gap/translational research: hard to find respondents: there is a gap
between the practice and research world.
- Evidence based management: to facilitate the managerial decisions based on evidence.
Currently managers still strongly go for their own intuition. I know this company/job; my
judgement is better.
1
,Translational research: moving research to practice in our daily lives. It’s the systematic effort to
move research from initial discovery to practice and ultimately to impact our lives. It takes a lot of
time for these theory’s to filter into practice.
Research-practice continuum: the process of moving from an initial research idea or discovery to
practice, and the potential for the idea to influence our lives or world. The research practice
continuum assumes that different discoveries take different pathways trough the continuum. The
translation process works in both directions.
Difference between basic and applied research: Basic/fundamental research is conducted
(uitgevoerd) to satisfy curiosity, applied research is focused on finding answers on real-life problems
in organizations.
- Basic research: research that is designed to generate discoveries and to understand how the
discoveries work.
- Applied research: research where a discovery is tested under increasingly controlled
conditions in real-world contexts. Discoveries related to humans.
- Implementation and dissemination research: research that assesses how well an innovation
or discovery can be distributed in and carried out in a broad range of contexts that extend
beyond the original controlled studies.
- Policy research: designed to investigate existing policies (beleid) or develop and test new
ones.
- Impact research: assesses the broader effects of a discovery or innovation on society.
Expected that system for synthesizing large numbers of research studies will become the normative
way that research about new discoveries moves from the basic-applied stage to implementation and
2
,dissemination (verspreiding) in broader context.
During the testing of new discovery during the basic and applied research period, a number of
separate research projects are likely to be conducted. It’s a good idea to check the research
synthesis this is a systematic study of multiple prior research projects that addresses the same
research questions/topics. The synthesis summarizes the results in a way that can be used by
practitioners.
! There are two types of research synthesis:
1. Meta-analysis: uses statistical methods to combine the results of similar studies quantitatively in
order to allow general conclusions to be made. A type of systematic review. You can try to
summarize all the studies. Meta analysis based on a large sample, so it’s trusted.
2. Systematic review: focuses on a specific question or issue and uses specific preplanned methods
to identify, select, assess, and summarize the findings of multiple research studies. Stronger
conclusions than a single study. Can be a panel of experts who discuss the research literature.
The disadvantage is that this can be written in a scientific style, which makes it hard to use. To
provide this, the guideline is a useful mechanism: a systematic process that leads to a specific set of
research-based recommendations for practice that usually includes some estimates of how strong
the evidence is for each recommendation. See figure above, includes guidelines.
Evidence-based practice (EBP): movement designed to encourage or require practitioners to employ
practices that are based on research evidence as reflected in research syntheses or practice
guidelines. Better integration of research and practice. First in medicine (1997).
Society became more aware of dominance of research, we think differently about research
enterprise; as evolutionary system. Based on evolutionary epistemology: branch of philosophy that
holds that ideas evolve through the process of natural selection.
1.2 Conceptualizing research
One of most difficult aspects is how to develop the idea for a research project.
- Practical problems in the field;
- Literature in your specific field. Requests For Proposals (RFPs): document issued by a
government agency or other organization that, typically, describes the problem that needs
addressing, the contexts in which it operates, the approach the agency would like you to
take to investigate the problem, and the amount the agency would be willing to pay for
such research.
- Think up their research topic on their own. Influenced by background, culture etc.
One of the most important early steps in a research project is the conducting of the literature
review: systematic compilation and written summary of all of the literature published in scientific
journals that is related to a research topic of interest. A literature review is typically included in the
introduction section of a research write-up.
- Concentrate your efforts on the research literature, determine what the most credible
research journals are and start there. Check if it’s peer-reviewed, most of the time the
credibility is higher.
- Do the review early in the research process.
- Begin to think about whether the study is feasible (haalbaar) at all. Considerations; trade-
offs between rigor and practicality.
- Think about how long the research will take.
- Think about ethical constraints.
- Determine whether you can acquire the cooperation needed to take the project to its
3
, successful conclusion.
- Determine the degree to which costs will be manageable.
The peer review process
• Final check of manuscript quality yet no guarantee.
• Political (try finding qualitative research articles or research
in which hypotheses are not supported).
• Journals can afford to be more critical and selective when
they have higher impact.
Example reviewer comments…
• It is safe to say that the authors want to see their paper
published more than I really want to reject it.
• The work is trivial, and there is no novelty in the work, the
approach or the results. The authors do not solve anything
and the implications in this context are quite possibly
irrelevant.
• Such a prestigious journal can surely make better use of its
limited space.
1.3 The language of research
Terms that help describe key aspects of contemporary (hedendaags) social research:
- Theoretical: research is theoretical, meaning that much of it is concerned with developing,
exploring, or testing the theories or ideas that social researchers have about how the world
operates.
- Empirical: based on direct observations and measurements of reality.
- Probabilistic: based on probabilities.
- Causal: pertaining to a cause-effect relationship, hypothesis or relationship. Something is
causal if it leads to an outcome or makes an outcome happen causal relationship.
4
