Research For Managerial Decisions

Module 1

Introduction to Business Research- definition – research and managers – need for Business research – type of business research – exploratory and conclusive - basic and applied research – qualitative and quantitative research – business research applications in marketing - human resource management - financial and accounting decisions - production and operations management - cross-functional areas - knowledge about research and managerial effectiveness- case studiesbusiness research in the 21st century.

Module 2

General Research Process- identifying and defining research problem - literature survey - identification of key research variables - theoretical framework - formulating research hypothesis Formulation of research design - sampling design – data collection and data editing - data analysis and interpretation - format of research report - research proposal framework. Measurement and scaling - concepts and operational definitions - nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales - comparative scales -non-comparative scales - criteria for good measurement - reliability - validity – sensitivity.

Module 3

Sampling Design- probability and non-probability sampling methods - merits and demerits -Review of various sampling methods - determination of sample size – sampling errors. Data Collection: Secondary and primary methods of data collection-data collection and data editing - coding - categorization - handling unsatisfactory responses and missing values - questionnaire construction - type of questions - guidelines for questionnaire designing - questionnaire testing - other methods of data collection - observation - projective methods - goodness of fit of data -reliability and consistency - Cronbach’s Alpha.

Module 4

Data analysis and interpretation: Descriptive analysis of uni-variate and bi-variate data – parametric tests for hypotheses testing - z test - t test – ANOVA (Theory only) - introduction to MANOVA and ANCOVA (Theory only); SEM (Theory only) - nonparametric tests for hypotheses testing - Chi-square - run test for randomness - one and two-sample sign tests - Mann-Whitney U test - Wilcoxon signed-rank test - Kruskal-Wallis test - Correlation and regression analysis. Only Theory for the following topics: Multivariate analysis - dependency techniques: multiple regression - discriminant analysis - conjoint analysis inter-dependency techniques: Factor Analysis - Cluster Analysis

Module 5

Reporting and Thesis Writing- Structure and components of scientific reports - Types of report – Technical reports and thesis – Significance – Different steps in the preparation – Layout, structure and Language of typical reports – Illustrations and tables - Bibliography, referencing and footnotes- Reference Management Software - Oral presentation – Planning – Preparation – Practice – Making presentation – Use of visual aids - Importance of effective communication – Reproduction of published material – Plagiarism - Citation and acknowledgement - Reproducibility and accountability.