Assessment

Task 1: Literature Review and Research Design (Individual) Objective(s): This addresses subject learning objectives.

Word limit: 2500 words.

Task: Students are to identify a management based research problem from a 2014/2015 online news story. The report should discuss the design of a project that may provide a solution to the problem using a quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods approach. The report should contain an essay of about 2000 words on the chosen approach including an extensive literature review on the method being employed as well as a discussion of why it would be suitable to apply to the chosen scenario, how it would be applied, your research design, and any foreseeable issues which may arise using this approach for the scenario.Discuss the sort of results you would expect and what would be an appropriate form of analysis. Note: A copy of the news story, which has formed the basis for your research, must be included with the final report.

Assessment task 2: Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis Assignment/Examination (Individual) Objective(s): This addresses subject learning objectives.

Word limit: 2500 words.

Task: Individually you are required to design and carry out a questionnaire-based survey on people's attitudes towards some "topical" issue. Several appropriate topics will be mentioned in class, but feel free to choose your own. The questionnaire and data analysis should be designed to answer the following questions:

a. Overall, what are people's attitudes to the ‘target issue'?

b. Do these attitudes vary systematically with the type of person?

c. What statistically significant relationships, if any, exist between these different attitudes and personal traits?

The subject variables which define the ‘type of person' may be demographic variables, such as age, gender, ethnic origin, occupational or educational background, but may also be attitudinal variables, such as political affiliation.

Subject ‘types' defined by combinations of these variables should also be considered. (For example, a comparison of attitudes of young males, old males, young females and old females, could be made.) Your study should give consideration to at least three subject variables.

The choice of these variables should be made on the basis of their plausible relevance to the target issue being investigated.

The questionnaire will have a maximum of 20 questions, and should be designed so that it can be completed in only a few minutes. The questionnaire should contain at least one "open-ended" question. Responses to this question should be analysed using "content analysis" and graphically displayed as will be described in lectures. ( Note: Care should be taken that an open-ended question is chosen which will give rise to responses which will allow of a substantial content analysis to be carried out. More than one such question can be included to ensure that at least one results in a suitable set of responses.)

A minimum of about 30 subjects is required for this project, although a greater number may make the analysis and interpretation of some of the results easier.

The questionnaire responses are to be coded into a spreadsheet (or data matrix) format, and analysed using ‘univariate' and ‘bivariate', analyses, as will be described in class using SPSS software. Considerable graphical analysis will also be required.

There are three assessment components involving the questionnaire-based survey.

1) Research proposal

This will consist of the following sections:

a) A title page: title of project.

b) Introduction (about two pages)

- statement of issue to be investigated

- brief literature review

- background and significance of the issue

c) Aims and Expectations/Hypotheses (about half a page)

d) While the questions themselves are not necessary at this stage, an indication of your dependent and independent variables, the open ended question you will ask and the planned survey sample should be given e) References

2) Questionnaire and Covering Letter

This will consist of two documents;

a. A copy of the covering letter to be provided to survey participants

b. The final copy of the questions correctly laid out 3) Written Report

A write-up of your key research findings

Time in lectures will be devoted to the topic of report writing. This is to be done individually.

IMPORTANT:

In order to ensure that your research complies with the ethical standards of UTS and the Faculty of Business, ALL questionnaires (including the covering letter or introduction) must be approved by the lecturer before they are distributed. For the purposes of this exercise, it is better to avoid issues or questions that have the potential of being embarrassing or sensitive to some people. Therefore, before any of the questionnaires are distributed, please submit part 2 of the assessment, i.e. the COMPLETE and FINAL version of the questionnaire, including the covering letter, by the due date.