Business Research Design Skills and Strategies

Introduction

Business research is a significant step to start any new project or subsequent investment, it is a tool to get the information about how to make the profit be the maximum. The target of business research always are the market environment and trend of consumers. When you need to make a decision about wether invest a project or undertake a new project, you have to ensure the investment will not loss or get your minimum of goal of earning, then the business research is such vital.

Research Strategies

Research strategies include two main methods: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative

This is a widely used method in business research and allows access to significantly high numbers of participants. The availability of online sites enables the wide and cheap distribution of surveys and the organization of the responses. Although the development of questions may appear easy, to develop a meaningful questionnaire that allows the answering of research questions is difficult. Questionnaires need to appeal to respondents, cannot be too long, too intrusive or too difficult to understand.

They also need to measure accurately the issue under investigation. For these reasons it is also advisable, when possible, to use questionnaires that are available on the market and have already been thoroughly validated. This is highly recommended for projects such as the one you need to carry out for this course. When using questionnaires decisions have to be made about the size of the sample and whether and when this is representative of the whole population studied. Surveys can be administered to the whole population (census), for example to all employees of a specific organization.

Qualitative

There are three types of qualitative research, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured, which are the most popular research strategies. Qualitative means that in the research, researchers focus on obtaining rich information from various aspects through interviews, questionnaires and online questionnaires. But they need to plan who they're going to talk to and which way they're going to do it is critical, group or individual. As far as possible, the respondents should select high-quality and targeted people, so as to avoid excessive bias and errors in the results. However, researchers also need broad and specialized skills, because they need to list the best questions to get the results they want

Research Design

Below are the five typical dimensions of the research process.

Research design is the method and technical framework chosen by researchers for their subsequent research projects. A reasonable and logical way to combine the various research designs and apply them to specific parts of the research to achieve effective solutions. The research design is mainly completed through data collection, measurement and analysis. Different research topics need to take into account the application of different designs in order to minimize conclusion bias. Below are the five typical dimensions of the research process.

• Experimental
• Cross-sectional
• Longitudinal
• Case study
• Comparative
• There are two exact cases to illustrate the designs of research.

According to the research ‘Making market research work in Saudi Arabia ’( Aichner, 2018). This research mainly adopt qualitative, quantitative and longitudinal design. This essay aim to explore the transform of market in KSA. Because of the rapid expansion of population, and a large number of foreign investors. The market here is full of opportunities but also full of instability. Secondly, KSA is gradually getting rid of its dependence on oil, so comprehensive research is essential in the process of exploring the market. This article mainly uses data comparison and sampling interview. By the data as of 2018, the proportion of young men has over 60%, and with the increasing development of input and output, the percentage are predicted be more. This statistic obeyed the principle of quantitative.

Whatever research, the strongest evidence is the exact figure. The subsequent content of this study refer to the changes in KSA. When the research in KSA occur, the language issue may be a significant issue, because many citizen of KSA do not speak English. But the recent years, with more and more external population and culture input from Europe and US, the younger population master fluent English almostly, hence the problem should be out of consideration. Facing a target market, the variable factors are important in the research. The researcher have to obtain the newest information about market, which is the function of longitudinal.

Another case essay is ‘The Alibaba effect: Spatial consumption inequality and the welfare gains from e-commerce’(Fan& Tang, 2018). This essay used a lot of methods of research design, and through the such huge resources, it showed us a clear and detailed consequence. Author told us that Alibaba appeared had changed the commercial environment in China, it influenced the welfare of rural and urban. The research wants to interpret the change by a systemic research.

First of all, the research put a series of data forward which show the increasing of economy in e-commerce is tremendous, whilst compare the differences between metropolis and some areas where are remote before. The main reason is the e-commerce has solved the spatial consumption inequality, which means the remote area always hard to sell or purchase the goods.

Nowadays, the convenient channel of transaction result in the difference of price of goods disappear, and the only difference is the more expensive delivery. According to these, it is obvious that the essay adopt deductive method to proceed by a consequence. Under a certain thesis, the following content just need to prove it via a large amount of data and cases.

After the reason states, researcher starts to define it and explain how it could be worked out. They list some models, such as general equilibrium model, quantitative model with the creators as evidences.

In the second paragraph, authors cited a lot of figures and real case to explain the importance of e-commerce. China's relatively less developed traditional retail industry helps explain both the rapid rise of e-commerce and its spatial distribution. ‘Next, the author discusses the status quo and distribution space of Chinese retailers. Traditional offline retailers are often composed of small and private businesses, and in 2013, the top 100 retailers in China accounted for only 9% of total sales, compared with 36% in the United States. In addition, most of the big shopping malls are concentrated in metropolitan areas, such as Walmart

In addition, the whole essay adopt a mass of quantitative analysis by a lot of formulas. The samples include 320 regions with matched data each one. These calculation for the budget, cost and profit, these all were the most important pre-condition to success the e-commerce.

Besides, in the middle of the paper, the researchers found that online transactions in remote areas were larger than those in cities. Based on the exact data, the researchers set out a series of hypotheses' because consumers in remote areas have more limited choices of products and have to pay more for offline retail. This assumption excludes several variables and chooses to discuss the results directly. In this way, researchers repeatedly change the variables and basically analyze the problem from every possible Angle. Even in subsequent analyses, the researchers once again applied quantitative analysis to the hypothesis.

The finally, the consequence showed reader the complete result about the decreasing inequality of economy layout in rural because of the e-commerce, and if the reader want to get the more professional information, this essay use a so detailed process to calculate them.

Evaluation

These two research cases both used the mixed method design. First one is a profile of market research, it is a plan book, but it still includes many research design, such as qualitative, quantitative and longitudinal. When the researcher want to measure the profit and risk in a new or potential market, the appropriate method of research is vital. The next essay is about Alibaba, what the e-commerce change and how they achieve that. As an existed phenomenon at present, author use deductive method to discuss it.

The huge number of formulas became the strongest evidence and be clear to describe the pre observation of market. In such a specialized study, the author cites a large number of expert arguments to achieve the reliability of the data and theory. In the process of proving the conclusion, researchers basically cover every dependent variable and independent variable. If applied to the investment decision of an enterprise, the risk and rate of return of the project will be clearly shown

Conclusion

The purpose of both research strategy and design is to clarify one's decision-making process and conceptual structure. Therefore, before starting your own research, it is necessary to take time to structure a research design, which can organize your thoughts and maximize the effectiveness and reliability of your conclusions, and avoid misleading or incomplete conclusions.