Research Methodology Assignment

Research Questions and Motivation

Brief description of research conducted by a university in Australia. The researchers hope to publish the paper that comes from this research in a major scholarly journal.

For this assignment, you will need to analyse some key aspects of the research as described. As an expert user of research you are asked to identify the (1) research question or questions, hypothesis or research model and assess whether they are valid and appropriate, and (2) the motivation for this research. Again assessing the substance and appropriateness of the motivation

For both (1) and (2), discuss whether the researchers could have enhanced their research and if so, how?

Each part (1) and (2) are worth ten marks each.

Case Study for Assignment -

Associate Professor Jack Raven works at a University in Western Australia. He is known for his work in capital markets research and organisational governance. He is working on a data set of not-for-profit organisations in Australia from 1999 to 2016. The data comprises 18 calendar years of data. In all, 1012 organisations are represented in the data and of these, 230 are represented across all of the 18 years.

The research issue to be addressed is: Are not-for-profit nongovernment organisations which include board members who possess professional qualifications more successful financially and better managed than other organisations? He thinks this is an important question because he has been involved in a number of these bodies and they all seem amateurish. He takes the entire population of the 230 organisations described above to test his hypothesis. The data was hand collected by a research assistant funded by a research grant from the Faculty. She collected details of the members of each board over each year. She was able to identify those with accounting, engineering and legal qualifications in 40% of all cases. Many boards, about 50% of the sample, had members with no qualifications at all. The remaining boards had members with technical or religious qualifications or had members with university or college degrees in arts, science, the social sciences or health. It was interesting that some boards had years where all members were professionally qualified, while other organisations just had years where one member was so qualified; normally in either law or accounting.

In all she had provided Assoc. Professor Raven with an Excel spreadsheet with 4100 data points. There were a total of 40 instances (organisation-years) where there was no access to financial information for the organisation. These missing data points involved some 30 organisations. Raven decided to remove all these organisations from analysis. This left 200 organisations that had complete data for the entire 18 years. This, he argued in the first draft of the paper he was writing, would "add considerable validity to the study".

As the matter is so crucial to social fabric of Western Australia he sees funding form the state government.