Part -1:

REQUIREMENT:

The need to make intelligent, informed decisions ultimately requires an organisation to engage in research. Remember, not every decision requires research. In this assignment you are required to prepare a causal research proposal based on the following structure:

A) INTRODUCTION

i) Research Background

• Discuss the background of the research that will be conducted. The research should be in your area of interest.

ii) Problem Statement

• Identify, define and discuss the overall research problem that you wish to investigate. You may want to list and elaborate related and relevant sub-problems to support the overall problem. You must provide references from the literature (at least 5 references) to support the problems accordingly. This can be from books, journals or conference proceedings and published reports.

• Justify why these problems need to be addressed and what are the consequences of not addressing it.

iii) Research Objectives and the Scope of the Research

• What are the objectives of the proposed research? The objectives must be addressing the problem. You need to have an overall objective and between 3 to 5 specific objectives.

• What is the scope of the proposed research? The scope must be realistic and manageable within the stipulated time of the research undertaking.

B) LITERATURE REVIEW

Provide a CRITICAL REVIEW of the literature in the proposed research areas/topics. Take note that literature review is NOT just recitation of previous research. Outline the weakness of previous research (if there are any) and explain how you propose to overcome them in your research. Develop some propositions based on your preliminary findings and observations.

C) THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Based on the result of your preliminary findings through secondary data analyses, literature review and qualitative research draw a diagram to identify and show the relationship between the independent, dependent, moderator and/or mediator variables.

Students should use proper symbols/arrows when drawing the conceptual framework. Indicate the moderator variables and/or mediator variables if any, by properly locating their position in the diagram. (Please refer to any good academic journal for examples of how this is done).

1. How would you conceptualise variables or elements in the conceptual framework, systems architecture, conceptual model or model?

2. Provide an operational definition for each of the variables or elements.

Part -2:

REQUIREMENT:

The need to make intelligent, informed decisions ultimately requires an organisation to engage in research. Remember, not every decision requires research. In this assignment you are required to continue preparing the causal research proposal as in part 1, based on the following structure:

1. Research Methodology

• Discuss how the research will be executed to achieve the proposed research objectives. The methodology should be based on the methods that are relevant to research area. The methodology selected must be able to achieve the listed research objectives. Please refer to any thesis, journals and conference papers prior to choosing the appropriate methods to conduct the proposed research. Provide at least FOUR literatures to justify the selected methods (Refer to your Literature Review section).

• Discuss the study setting - experiment (laboratory or field) versus survey or case study. This should clearly explain how the research will be conducted

2. Data Collection / Requirement Gathering Methods

• Discuss in extreme detail the data collection procedure or requirements gathering methods that will be used to conduct the research.

• Discuss about the sample selection procedure and the sampling framework (where necessary).

• Discuss the data analysis process and the proposed analysis methods that would be used.

• How the research results will be validated and evaluated (for example the use of benchmarking, data sets, case studies and others)