Welcome back

Don’t worry if you have not made a final decision yet – this is a critical issue and so it is worth taking your time to confirm your research topic.

The activities this week should help you further clarify your focus because helping you begin the process of translating your general ideas into a coherent and appropriate piece of research. We call this operationalising your research – or starting the process of putting your ideas into operation.

Similarly to last week, the aim here is to establish some of the foundational principles of research. This means that you should not expect to finish this week with all your research plans in place, this requires you to complete the other short courses in this program where we look in much greater detail at some key research practices, such as data collection and analysis. But in order for those things to make sense, you need to first have a refined set of ideas about what you want to achieve in your research and, in particular, some practical plans, such as the questions you want to answer and how you will organise your project.

By the end of the week you should be able to:

• Appreciate the link between research objectives and research questions
• Understand the nature of a research hypothesis and how these are used in research
• Develop an insight into how methods of data collection and analysis are used within management research
• Reflect on some of the practical aspects of undertaking management research