Engineering Manager
CHAPTER 2 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
Instructional Goals
1. To help participants comprehend that scientific research offers assurance to the manager that the results of a study can be relied upon and further action can be taken at low risk. 2. To impress on the students that business research, however rigorously conducted, cannot produce 100 percent scientific results in terms of precise solutions. 3. To sensitize participants to being watchful about observing the different cues in the environment which offer some idea of a gap in the desired and actual state of affairs. 4. To help students understand that applied research, though limited in generalizability, still has to be “scientific”.
Discussion Questions
The first two questions are straightforward and the answers may be extracted from the text.
3. One hears the word research being mentioned by several groups such as research organizations, college and university professors, doctoral students, graduate assistants working for faculty, graduate and undergraduate students doing their term papers, research departments in industries, newspaper reporters, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and several other professionals and nonprofessionals. In the light of what you have learned in this unit, how would you rank the aforementioned groups of people in terms of the extent to which they might be doing “scientific” investigations? Why? To the extent that any of the above groups conforms to the hallmarks of science, they would be doing scientific investigation. It
© 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. www.wileyeurope.com/college/sekaran 7
is quite possible that poor research is done by research agencies, and excellent research is conducted by a graduate assistant. The ultimate test is the rigor of the research which would lend itself to testability, replicability, accuracy and precision, generalizability, objectivity, and parsimony. Research organizations and research departments in industries engage themselves in both
Instructional Goals
1. To help participants comprehend that scientific research offers assurance to the manager that the results of a study can be relied upon and further action can be taken at low risk. 2. To impress on the students that business research, however rigorously conducted, cannot produce 100 percent scientific results in terms of precise solutions. 3. To sensitize participants to being watchful about observing the different cues in the environment which offer some idea of a gap in the desired and actual state of affairs. 4. To help students understand that applied research, though limited in generalizability, still has to be “scientific”.
Discussion Questions
The first two questions are straightforward and the answers may be extracted from the text.
3. One hears the word research being mentioned by several groups such as research organizations, college and university professors, doctoral students, graduate assistants working for faculty, graduate and undergraduate students doing their term papers, research departments in industries, newspaper reporters, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and several other professionals and nonprofessionals. In the light of what you have learned in this unit, how would you rank the aforementioned groups of people in terms of the extent to which they might be doing “scientific” investigations? Why? To the extent that any of the above groups conforms to the hallmarks of science, they would be doing scientific investigation. It
© 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. www.wileyeurope.com/college/sekaran 7
is quite possible that poor research is done by research agencies, and excellent research is conducted by a graduate assistant. The ultimate test is the rigor of the research which would lend itself to testability, replicability, accuracy and precision, generalizability, objectivity, and parsimony. Research organizations and research departments in industries engage themselves in both