About this Book
Why this book?
There are many different books on business research methods, so why make one specifically for this course? There’s three reasons for this.
1. Audience
While there are indeed many books on business research methods out there, every book is written with a purpose and an audience in mind. For example, many books on academic skills are at an introductory (e.g. first- year bachelor) level. As a result, they are broad in scope but often limited in detail. In contrast, many other books aimed at e.g. master-level students are very detailed, perhaps too much so. However, you are reading this book because you’re in the pre-msc programme at the University of Groningen. You might not know it, but this means that you are part of a rather unique audience. You’ve already completed some prior education at a University or University of Applied sciences, which means you’re not a beginner. As a group, pre-msc students come from a varied set of backgrounds, which may be business related, or not at all.
2. Accessibility
Then there’s another issue: accessibility. Many great books on research methods are now out of print. When they’re not, they tend to be rather expensive (50-100 euros is no exception). While this is something that you quickly get used to as a student, these amounts start adding up over the years. This is why we prefer a book that is freely accessible to anyone.
3. Adaptability
Instructors often adapt their course to a book, rather than the other way around. In contrast, this book is meant as a ‘living document’ in which chapters are added or adjusted over multiple editions of the research skills pre-msc course. Our hope is that, in time, our experiences as teachers in this course (and your questions as students!) improve the quality of the book. Moreover, we hope that -in turn- this also improves the quality of the course. This book is therefore updated every year.
A note before starting this course
Given the fact that business research knows many disciplines such as HRM, operations research, marketing, finance, change management, and so forth, there is one very important thing you should know. The goal of this book -and the research skills course- is to give you basic knowledge about research methods. This knowledge is based on our perception of what all these disciplines share. Every discipline has different research interests, but there are many similarities in how all these disciplines search for literature, how they conduct, say, a good experiment, and how they perform and report on a statistical tests.
Once you’ve finished the research skills course and are writing a research paper or perhaps a master thesis, be warned: you are very likely to encounter professors who have a different opinion on some of the material that you encounter in this course. Academics are nothing if not opinionated. Perhaps they use different statistical software or have different ideas on what makes a good conceptual model. Perhaps they use different data collection methods or use statistical tests that you don’t happen to know, and so forth. While there’s many things we share, there are also things that are unique to a specific discipline, subtopic, or even professor. Given the varied backgrounds of students in the pre-msc programme, and given the fact that this course is a part of many different pre-msc programmes, our focus has to be on what most disciplines share rather than on what they don’t.
That being said, if you’re working on your master thesis, please remember this course! If there’s a specific element that you genuinely feel other students would benefit from learning about sooner, but is not covered in this course, please let us know! Needs evolve over time, and the advantage of an open access textbook is that we can easily add material where we deem it necessary.
Original Material
This book is an adaptation of the fourth edition of Research Methods in Psychology by Jhangiani, Chiang, Cuttler & Leighton (2019). It also adapts chapters from Social Science Research: Principles, Methods and Practices, by Bhattatcherjee (2019) Both these works are widely used and peer reviewed. Moreover, both these books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The unique thing about books published under this license is that others are allowed to freely use, change, remix and otherwise adapt these books, as long as they use the same license and do not use the work for commercial purposes.
The goal of this adaptation is to improve the fit of the material in these earlier works to the Research Skills pre-msc course, which focuses on business research rather than psychological research, though the disciplines share many similarities. To this end, we have selected and adapted a set of relevant chapters from these two original books, and expanded on these chapters.
