Business research

of your Essay Sub Paper Due Qualitative Research Designs Qualitative business research addresses business objectives through methods that allow the researcher to interpret the phenomena without numerical measurement. The focus is on new insights and hidden meanings. The data is non statistical and generally open to interpretations based on the researcher (William G. Zikmund, 2010).
There are 4 main orientations to Qualitative research under which various research tools are categorized (William G. Zikmund, 2010). These are:
Phenomenology: originating in philosophy and psychology
Ethnography: based on anthropology
Grounded Theory: based on sociology
Case Studies: originates in psychology and in business research
Under these categories come the tools which form the qualitative research design. These include:
Focus Group discussions: Small group discussions led by moderators
Depth interviews: a probing interview between the researcher and respondent
Conversations: Unstructured dialogue record by the researcher
Semi structured interviews: Open ended questions that ask for short essay type responses
Word associations: Records the firs thoughts that come to the respondents mind to some stimulus
Observation: Recording notes which describe observed events
Collages: Respondents assemble pictures that represent their thoughts (William G. Zikmund, 2010).
Quantitative Research Designs
Quantitative business research is research which addresses research objectives through empirical assessment, numerical measurement and analysis. The resulting quantitative data represent the phenomena by assigning numbers in an ordered/meaningful way (William G. Zikmund, 2010).
There are various tools used to obtain quantitative data. These include:
Surveys: contacting respondents to obtain representative sample of the target population. Surveys further include:
Questionnaires: these questionnaires can be structure or unstructured, disguised or undisguised. The main aim of these questionnaires is to ask questions according to the research objectives.
Cross sectional studies: a study in which segments of the population are sampled and data is collected from that at a single moment in time.
Longitudinal studies: A survey of respondents at different times, allowing analysis of Reponses which change over time. These further contain tracking studies and longitudinal studies (William G. Zikmund, 2010).
Works Cited
William G. Zikmund, B. J. (2010). Business Research Methods. US: South Western CENGAGE learning.