Develop skills associated with selecting and applying methods for data collection, stationery and time series data analysis and hypothesis testing.
Data collection
For section two, you will need to collect data connected to your objective and research question. For this section you can collect either primary data or secondary data. At this stage, you should think about the following items:
1. What data do you plan to acquire to answer your research question? Why? What kinds of instruments, variables, materials, or sources will you use (i.e. will you use observations, surveys, interviews, case studies, focus groups, experiments, documents, media, data base searches, etc.)? If you plan to use mixed methods, will they be sequential, concurrent or transformative? Why?
2. List the kinds of data/information that you plan to collect (e.g. testimonials, statistics, business/government reports, other research data, audio/video recordings, etc.). Also, consider two or three alternative ways you could gather data/information for this research.
3. If you plan to use research participants, where will they come from? How will they be sampled? How many participants will you require? If you are not using research participants, who will you use as the target audience of your data? Who would most benefit from your research, and why?
4. Business research topics relate to events that develop in time.
• Explain how you would acquire a snapshot of data relevant to your research question. Within the snapshot, the data become effectively stationary.
• Consider the evolution of data with time. How would you acquire the time series data relevant to your research question?
