Difference between Literature Review and Systematic Literature Review

A literature review, means  reviewing  the existing research work  and information available on a selected study area. For example suppose  research area is effectives of ambush marketing so reviewing the existing work already published on this topic is literature review . A systematic review can be defined as that systematic review that  focused on a specific research question .  For example – Research question is how satisfied the consumers are with amazon delivery service so here my focus is on a specific research question so to review the available research work or information to collect  for this particular research question is systematic  literature review. read...

Measuring relationship strength in meta analysis

The primary function of the procedures described so far is to help meta-analysis accept or reject the null hypothesis .Until recently,most researchers interested in social theory and the impact of social interventions have been content to simply identify relations that have some explanatory value.The prevalence of this “yes or no” question was partly due to the relativity recent development of the social sciences. Social hypothesis were crudely stated first approximation to the truth .Social researchers rarely asked how potent theories or interventions were for explaining human behaviour or how competing explanations compare with regard to their relative explanatory value .Today, as their theories and interventions are becoming more sophisticated ,social scientists are more often making enquiries about the size of relationship. read...

Some studies are painstakingly planned in advance; others are tailored as enquiry processes.

In presipified study questions of interest arguments supporting the inquiry,the specific procedures of the inquiry are worked out at the beginning of the investigation .Once the design is established ,the researcher implements the study,adhering to original plan as closely as possible. Much of the traditional empirical research in the social sciences is of this kind. Emergent studies have a long tradition in the humanities and in some branches of social sciences.In emergent studies ,the questions of interest ,supporting arguments ,and procedural details are worked out as the study proceeds .Such studies are most frequently employed to investigate natural variation ,to study phenomena afresh/or in all their normal complexity,or to explore the phenomena to see what can be learned.Emergent designs may also be used because researchers lack prior knowledge of phenomenon ,methodological tools are inappropriate or lacking,or situational control in inadequate to conduct a presipified study. read...

Open Ended Questions – How to devise open ended questions in your survey questionnaire for PhD research

An open-ended question is an open question where the response is recorded verbatim. An open-ended question is nearly always an open question. (It would be wasteful to record yes-no answers verbatim.)Open-ended questions are also known as ‘unstructured’ or ‘free response’ questions. Open-ended questions are used for a number of reasons: The researcher cannot predict what the responses might be, or it is dangerous to do so. Questions about what is liked and disliked about a product or service should always be open-ended, as it would be presumptuous to assume what people might like or dislike by having a list of pre-codes. We wish to know the precise phraseology that people used to respond to the question. We may be able to predict the general sense of the response but wish to know the terminology that people use. We may wish to quote some verbatim responses in the report or the presentation to illustrate something such as the strength of feeling that respondents feel. In response to the question ‘why will you not use that company again?’, a respondent may write in: ‘They were that awful. They mucked me for months, didn’t respond to my letters and when they did they could never get anything right. I shall never use them again.’ Had pre-codes been given on the questionnaire this might simply have been recorded as ‘poor service’.The verbatim response provides much richer information to the end-user of the research. Through analysis on the verbatim responses, clients can determine if the customer is talking about a business process, a policy issue, a people issue (especially in service delivery surveys), etc. This enables them to determine the extent of any challenges they will face when reporting the findings of the survey to their management. Common uses for open-ended questions include : Likes and dislikes of a product, concept, advertisement, etc; Spontaneous...

Summarizing and interpreting the information in case study research – PhD Help Series

In case study research,making sense of information collected from multiple sources is a recursive process in which the researcher interacts with the information throughout the investigative process.In other words, unlike some forms of research in which the data are examined only at the end of information collection period ,case study research involves ongoing examination and interpretation of the data in order to reach tentative conclusions and to refine the research questions .Case study researchers adhere to several guidelines as they simultaneously summarize and interpret information gathered when doing case study research. read...