Reference no: EM132202978

Research Project Report Outline

The goal of your report is to clearly communicate the process and the outcomes of your research project. Here are some essential points that must be communicated in your report followed by a suggested outline. Of course, no one outline will fit every type of project, but it offers you some starting point.

INTRODUCTION: Should include a clear statement of management dilemma, managerial question, and research question. For a good grade on this part, a connection between these three is required.

The managerial dilemma i.e declining profits (what even got you thinking that this broad issue is worth addressing with your research project?) should lead to the managerial problem i.e how to increase sales (what is the question of interest that emerges from the broad issue or problem identified above?) which then clearly leads to a specific research question the i.e reasons for the decline in sales in 2017 etc. (so, given the managerial question, what specific aspect of the question do you hope your research project will address?)

The introduction section should end with a clear statement of the research objectives (that logically emerge from your management dilemma). This is important at this stage because this is the standard you will be held to at the end. The examiner should be able to see if your research project did, in fact, end up addressing some aspect of the management question you specified.

The results of your research must be "actionable" in some way, meaning that it should provide information leading to some actual decision. The examiner should also have a clear sense of your dependent variables (and any independent variables you intend to study, if appropriate).

LITERATURE REVIEW: What have other people looked at relating to the topic? This is where you can justify a lot of your decisions regarding research design. The literature review looks at prior work on the topic of your study. You need to present evidence that you did a fairly thoughtful and thorough evaluation of past research on the topic you are addressing. A lower grade will result if the literature review appears to be superficial or purely done "after the fact" (i.e., you completed the project and then looked for research to support your findings).

Think of it as a spiral - starting with the outside ring (looking at research on your broad topic), you end with the material that is directly related to your research. The literature review should be organised in a logical and integrated way that links it to your research question(s).

For some projects (i.e projects which address systemic or procedural issues faced by an organization), the literature review can take the form of a survey of current practices

METHOD: This is the section where you clearly explain what you did. Although some will be longer than others, your report should include the following sections if necessary :

a. Sampling Design (if sampling is being done) : What population are you studying? what sampling method did you use? (nothing wrong with a convenience sample, just make sure you state the assumptions and how you attempted to ensure the representativeness of the sample) What was your sampling frame? How could your sampling decisions have introduced systematic biases into your data? Make brief mention of these possible errors and your attempts to control for them - major potential issues should be discussed later in the limitations section. The point is to be brief and address the most obvious concerns and your responses here.

For those using the case study approach, the concept of sampling is still relevant as you need to determine and justify your choice of the case studies to be analysed. As you would remember, case selection methods are somewhat different from the methods used for sample selection, but are still influenced to some degree by the nature of your study.

b. Research Design: Was the study exploratory, descriptive, or causal? If relevant, you should include details on your experimental design. Otherwise talk about your survey. What were the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen design? Did you do any follow ups to increase response rate? You can also include some details on your questionnaire design here. Talk of question wording issues, attempts to ensure proper interpretation of questions, results of pretests, etc.

c. Data Collection: This is the part where you describe the specifics of how you collected the data. Did you use face to face interviews? Did you use focus group interviews? Key informants? Available data? Content Analysis? Historical Analysis? Did you hand the survey to people you knew? How did you collect the responses? How much time did it take? What controls did you have to ensure data quality? What problems did you encounter in collecting the data? Include brief statements about how your data collection procedure could have impacted your results, but leave the bulk of that discussion to a later section on limitations. Include all issues related to the collection of your data here.

d. Data Analysis: This should be a very brief section that simply refers to the methods for data analysis and handling (how did you code the data, what software was used for analysis.

e. Limitations: This is an important part of your report for this class. Given the time constraints on doing this project, there should be several things that could have or should have been done better. Here is where you get to lay out all the problems with your research project. What are all the things you should have done differently? How did these "flaws" impact your results? It may be better to simply number these limitations and give a brief subhead before explaining how this limitation may have impacted your results. Don't arbitrarily put things in here that couldn't possibly have had an impact on your particular study.

Attachment:- Report outline.rar