Course Syllabus
INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH
• Definition, Scope and Importance of Research
• Objective of Research
• Growth of Research in the Hospitality Industry
• Ethical Consideration in Research
RESEARCH APPROACH
• Research Design
• Study Setting & Unit of Analysis
• Quantitative vs Qualitative
LITERATURE REVIEW
• Purpose of Literature Review
• Source of Literature Review
• APA Citation and References
TYPES OF RESEARCH, VARIABLES, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK & HYPOTHESES
• Types of Variable
• Theoretical Framework
• Propositions and Hypothesis development
• Operationalization of Variables
• Scales, Rating and Ranking
• Goodness of Measure
DATA COLLECTION & SAMPLING
• Sources of Data
• Methods of Collection
• Ethics in Data Collection
• Population and Sample
• Sampling Design
• Sample Size
BASIC DATA ANALYSIS
• Data Coding and Data Entry
• Data evaluation and Interpretation
• Hypothesis testing
• Descriptive analysis and significant findings
• Limitations of findings
WRITING THE RESEARCH PROPOSAL & EFFECTIVE PRESENTATION
• Organization of Research Report - Contents
• Writing styles, writing ethics, restraint and objectivity
• Plagiarism
• Presentation Skills
• Presentation Rubric for Independent Study
• Definition, Scope and Importance of Research
• Objective of Research
• Growth of Research in the Hospitality Industry
• Ethical Consideration in Research
RESEARCH APPROACH
• Research Design
• Study Setting & Unit of Analysis
• Quantitative vs Qualitative
LITERATURE REVIEW
• Purpose of Literature Review
• Source of Literature Review
• APA Citation and References
TYPES OF RESEARCH, VARIABLES, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK & HYPOTHESES
• Types of Variable
• Theoretical Framework
• Propositions and Hypothesis development
• Operationalization of Variables
• Scales, Rating and Ranking
• Goodness of Measure
DATA COLLECTION & SAMPLING
• Sources of Data
• Methods of Collection
• Ethics in Data Collection
• Population and Sample
• Sampling Design
• Sample Size
BASIC DATA ANALYSIS
• Data Coding and Data Entry
• Data evaluation and Interpretation
• Hypothesis testing
• Descriptive analysis and significant findings
• Limitations of findings
WRITING THE RESEARCH PROPOSAL & EFFECTIVE PRESENTATION
• Organization of Research Report - Contents
• Writing styles, writing ethics, restraint and objectivity
• Plagiarism
• Presentation Skills
• Presentation Rubric for Independent Study
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1 : What do I need to do to prepare for research?
A1 : Conducting a research project is a long process that involves many stages, from the initial 'hunch' or idea to the final written report. This initial process of identifying your research interests is a vitally important one and integral to your future enjoyment of the research! Your research therefore begins well before you actually start collecting data: the preliminary stages of planning and practical groundwork are just as important in allowing the project to run smoothly. To ensure that you make the most of the later stages of data collection and analysis, there are a number of things you can do to prepare: The first of these is to formulate some specific research questions. You need to have a clear idea of what exactly it is you want to find out and how you are going to do it, because a project that lacks a clear focus is likely to go off track and be difficult to manage. Secondly, if you will be using a survey, questionnaire, or observation schedule in your research, it can be helpful to conduct a pilot study, in which you try out these instruments on a sample of people who will not be part of the final sample. For example, you could give some of your friends a copy of your draft questionnaire and ask them whether they had any difficulty filling it in. This will help you to identify any problems with the length, question order, wording, and so on, which can be rectified before you send out the final questionnaire. Thirdly, you can begin to think about how you will access and recruit your sample: are there any 'gatekeepers' whose permission you will have to seek out in order to negotiate access to the participants? Will you be able to find a comprehensive sampling frame of the population you are studying, and if not, what other, non-random, sampling strategies could you use? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will need to ensure that the project is a viable one in terms of ethical issues: is it likely to cause any harm, physically or emotionally, to the participants? Will they be able to give informed consent to take part, and if not, can you justify a decision to use covert methods or otherwise deceive people? How are you going to ensure that the participants remain anonymous and that their data are treated with confidentiality? Don't forget that these questions may affect studies based on secondary analysis of existing data as well: if you are analysing personal diaries and letters, can the individual's identity (and those of their family and friends) be identified from the quotations you use, and will they mind about this? Are there any copyright issues you need to address before reproducing someone else's work? If you are analysing the content of an organization's official documentation, might a critical analysis that you publish damage the author's professional reputation? Thinking about such ethical issues early on in the research process will help you to recognize your responsibilities as a social researcher: to yourself, to your participants and to the academic community.
Q2 : How do I develop my research interests?
A2 : Social research is a unique field. It is perhaps the only discipline that has the potential to be interested in anything and everything that involves human activity. Since all human activity is necessarily social, social researchers can be interested in anything that humans do. As a result, social researchers are only limited by their own imagination and they can generate their research projects using a range of influences. These include: personal interests and professional knowledge, as well as reading the literature, adapting a pre-existing study and secondary datasets to discover gaps in the knowledge base.
Q3 : Why do I need specific research questions?
A3 : Research questions help to focus your attention on a specific problem or topic area. This applies equally to quantitative and qualitative research strategies: although the latter can be quite open-ended, it is always a good idea to be clear about what you want to find out and why. As Bryman says in Chapter 4 of the textbook, research questions help you to search the literature more effectively, choose an appropriate methodological design, focus your data analysis and structure your written report.
Q4 : How do I find out about the literature on my topic?
A4 : The literature review serves two main functions within a research project. Firstly, it demonstrates to the reader (or examiner) that you have read around your subject area and can locate your research questions within a wider theoretical context. Secondly, it helps you to sharpen the focus of your research design by clarifying what has already been found out and where the gaps remain in the literature: what exactly is it that you need to find out, and why is it important? You can locate the books and articles most relevant to your topic by conducting a literature search: this typically involves typing keywords into a library catalogue, computer database or Internet search engine. Try searching with a variety of keywords and combinations of terms (e.g. both 'shy' and 'shyness', or 'shyness + gender'), and think laterally about some alternative words to try if your search returns no hits.
Q5 : How do I get an overall picture of research in my area?
A5 : Sometimes a researcher will want not only to explore the literature on a given topic, but also to summarize and evaluate it. The term 'systematic review' is given to this process, particularly when it is used in the context of large scale, empirical, quantitative studies. For example in medicine, researchers may seek to evaluate the effectiveness of a new treatment intervention for a particular disease: they do this by reading through all of the reports of studies they can find on this new treatment, to get an overall picture. The review is intended to be exhaustive - that is, rather than only looking at a sample of studies, the reviewer considers every study that could possibly be included, and evaluates as many of these as possible. In this way, systematic reviews are supposedly unbiased: the reviewer designs a set of criteria that will determine whether or not a study should be included, and then carefully trawls the relevant databases of books, articles and reports. They leave an audit trail of everything they have done, so that the procedure can be replicated. Given the scope of most student projects, it is unlikely that you will need to conduct a systematic review, but it is worth taking some time to find out about this technique so that you can develop a more critical, evaluative stance towards the literature you are reviewing.
A1 : Conducting a research project is a long process that involves many stages, from the initial 'hunch' or idea to the final written report. This initial process of identifying your research interests is a vitally important one and integral to your future enjoyment of the research! Your research therefore begins well before you actually start collecting data: the preliminary stages of planning and practical groundwork are just as important in allowing the project to run smoothly. To ensure that you make the most of the later stages of data collection and analysis, there are a number of things you can do to prepare: The first of these is to formulate some specific research questions. You need to have a clear idea of what exactly it is you want to find out and how you are going to do it, because a project that lacks a clear focus is likely to go off track and be difficult to manage. Secondly, if you will be using a survey, questionnaire, or observation schedule in your research, it can be helpful to conduct a pilot study, in which you try out these instruments on a sample of people who will not be part of the final sample. For example, you could give some of your friends a copy of your draft questionnaire and ask them whether they had any difficulty filling it in. This will help you to identify any problems with the length, question order, wording, and so on, which can be rectified before you send out the final questionnaire. Thirdly, you can begin to think about how you will access and recruit your sample: are there any 'gatekeepers' whose permission you will have to seek out in order to negotiate access to the participants? Will you be able to find a comprehensive sampling frame of the population you are studying, and if not, what other, non-random, sampling strategies could you use? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will need to ensure that the project is a viable one in terms of ethical issues: is it likely to cause any harm, physically or emotionally, to the participants? Will they be able to give informed consent to take part, and if not, can you justify a decision to use covert methods or otherwise deceive people? How are you going to ensure that the participants remain anonymous and that their data are treated with confidentiality? Don't forget that these questions may affect studies based on secondary analysis of existing data as well: if you are analysing personal diaries and letters, can the individual's identity (and those of their family and friends) be identified from the quotations you use, and will they mind about this? Are there any copyright issues you need to address before reproducing someone else's work? If you are analysing the content of an organization's official documentation, might a critical analysis that you publish damage the author's professional reputation? Thinking about such ethical issues early on in the research process will help you to recognize your responsibilities as a social researcher: to yourself, to your participants and to the academic community.
Q2 : How do I develop my research interests?
A2 : Social research is a unique field. It is perhaps the only discipline that has the potential to be interested in anything and everything that involves human activity. Since all human activity is necessarily social, social researchers can be interested in anything that humans do. As a result, social researchers are only limited by their own imagination and they can generate their research projects using a range of influences. These include: personal interests and professional knowledge, as well as reading the literature, adapting a pre-existing study and secondary datasets to discover gaps in the knowledge base.
Q3 : Why do I need specific research questions?
A3 : Research questions help to focus your attention on a specific problem or topic area. This applies equally to quantitative and qualitative research strategies: although the latter can be quite open-ended, it is always a good idea to be clear about what you want to find out and why. As Bryman says in Chapter 4 of the textbook, research questions help you to search the literature more effectively, choose an appropriate methodological design, focus your data analysis and structure your written report.
Q4 : How do I find out about the literature on my topic?
A4 : The literature review serves two main functions within a research project. Firstly, it demonstrates to the reader (or examiner) that you have read around your subject area and can locate your research questions within a wider theoretical context. Secondly, it helps you to sharpen the focus of your research design by clarifying what has already been found out and where the gaps remain in the literature: what exactly is it that you need to find out, and why is it important? You can locate the books and articles most relevant to your topic by conducting a literature search: this typically involves typing keywords into a library catalogue, computer database or Internet search engine. Try searching with a variety of keywords and combinations of terms (e.g. both 'shy' and 'shyness', or 'shyness + gender'), and think laterally about some alternative words to try if your search returns no hits.
Q5 : How do I get an overall picture of research in my area?
A5 : Sometimes a researcher will want not only to explore the literature on a given topic, but also to summarize and evaluate it. The term 'systematic review' is given to this process, particularly when it is used in the context of large scale, empirical, quantitative studies. For example in medicine, researchers may seek to evaluate the effectiveness of a new treatment intervention for a particular disease: they do this by reading through all of the reports of studies they can find on this new treatment, to get an overall picture. The review is intended to be exhaustive - that is, rather than only looking at a sample of studies, the reviewer considers every study that could possibly be included, and evaluates as many of these as possible. In this way, systematic reviews are supposedly unbiased: the reviewer designs a set of criteria that will determine whether or not a study should be included, and then carefully trawls the relevant databases of books, articles and reports. They leave an audit trail of everything they have done, so that the procedure can be replicated. Given the scope of most student projects, it is unlikely that you will need to conduct a systematic review, but it is worth taking some time to find out about this technique so that you can develop a more critical, evaluative stance towards the literature you are reviewing.