Essays on Research Methodology

The book presents a collection of essays addressing a perceived need for persistent and logical thinking, critical reasoning, rigor and relevance on the part of researchers pursuing their doctorates. Accordingly, eminent experts have come together to consider these significant aspects of the research process, which result in different knowledge claims in different fields or subject areas. An attempt has been made to find a common denominator across diverse management disciplines, so that the broadest range of researchers can benefit from the book. The topics have been carefully chosen to cover problem formulation, contextualizing, soft & hard modeling, qualitative and quantitative analysis and ethical issues, in addition to the design of experiments and survey-based research. The distinguishing feature of this book is that it recognizes the diverse backgrounds of scholars from different interdisciplinary areas as well as their varying needs with regard to modeling, observations, measurements, aggregation, data analyses, etc. After all, researchers are expected to deepen our understanding, expand on existing information, introduce fresh insights, present new evidence and/or disprove accepted theories, hypotheses etc. More importantly, the book cautions against the over-reliance on software packages and mechanical interpretation of results based on the size, sign and significance of the coefficients obtained. Instead, the focus is on the underlying theories, hypotheses and relationships and on establishing new ones. In doing so, due care is taken to clearly enunciate what exactly constitutes a knowledge claim and what is methodology as distinct from methods, tools and techniques.