Research Methodology and the Management Disciplines: The Need for Heterogeneity (1993)

As those of us involved in the relevant disciplines are all too aware, doing social science research of any description is not at all easy. The enormity of the problems facing researchers is made frighteningly clear by Seelye (1963), cited in Easthope (1984), who postulated the following: * social science is action: whatever a social scientist does s/he intervenes in the processes of the social world * inexhaustibility: one can never exhaust the social world because in describing it one adds to it * freedom: every theory enters into social behaviour and in a way that people are free to change their behaviour and negate it. Thus human beings, unlike physical objects, can become aware of the predictions made about their behaviour and so can alter that behaviour, thereby nullifying or moderating any prediction. It therefore concerns this writer that very little attention seems to be paid to research methodology in many areas of management teaching, especially at undergraduate level. Too often graduates leave higher education aware of only one research method, namely the survey, and even at that, their experience of this method is all too often confined to the descriptive postal survey. If the writer's impression is accurate, this represents a regrettable state of affairs on a number of counts. First of all, the survey, as is the case with other research methods, has advantages and disadvantages, and is more appropriate for use in some circumstances than in others. Secondly, meaningful research projects, as will become apparent in due course, very often require the investigator to employ more than one method. Thirdly, overuse of postal surveys can limit the amount of research which may be undertaken and the quality of research which is actually carried out. Take, for example, students and researchers working in the disciplines of say accounting, business administration and economics in a small geographical area such as Northern Ireland. In the Province the total population of industrial and commercial organisations is relatively small (and, of course, the number of organisations in the medium and large categories is much smaller still). Little wonder then, that some colleagues having tried to conduct postal surveys of such organisations in recent times, have found it increasingly difficult to attain adequate response rates. When one considers that Government departments, academics, students, commercial organisations, schoolchildren, Uncle Tom Cobley and all are sending questionnaires to the same small pool of organisations, it should come as no surprise that response rates are dropping off. Thus it seems timely to remind those involved in management and related research (especially novice researchers) that there are a number of research methods available to them; to identify a selection of these and briefly explore what each entails; and to weigh up their advantages and disadvantages. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EXPERIMENTAL AND NON-EXPERIMENTAL METHODS A research method essentially is a way of collecting and analysing empirical evidence, and traditionally such methods have been classified as being either experimental or non-experimental. However, as will be discussed further below, in more recent times a third category of research design has been developed. This category is referred to variously as quasi-experimental research designs--Cook and Campbell (1983); adaptive experiments--Lawler (1977); patch-up designs--Evans (1975) and so on. Spector (1981) states that the key difference between experimental and non-experimental designs concerns the degree to which the researcher controls whatever he or she is studying. In other words, non-experimental studies differ from experimental ones with respect to the amount of manipulation of research subjects and conditions undertaken by the researcher and not necessarily with respect to the research question asked or the conditions or characteristics studied. …