Data Issues and Research Design in Business Studies
This paper examines the role of research design in business studies, focusing on two published articles: one investigating consumer trust in online e-tailers and another exploring organizational commitment and ethical behavior among IT professionals. The paper critiques the hypothesis formation in both studies, arguing that each suffers from an overly internal focus that neglects the consumer's or employee's perspective. It further discusses how the selection of variables and research strategies directly affects the usefulness of findings, ultimately contending that a broader, more externally oriented approach to hypothesis development and variable definition is necessary for business research to yield genuinely actionable insights.
- Introduction: Scope of business research methods examined
- Selection of Hypotheses and Research Strategies: Hypothesis flaws in e-tailer and IT studies
- Critique of the E-Tailer Trust Study: Trust measurement gaps in e-tailer research
- Critique of the IT Professional Ethics Study: Myopic scope of IT ethics hypothesis design
- Creating Research Plans That Lead to Action: How better hypotheses yield actionable outcomes
- Summary: Call for externally oriented research design
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds its critique in specific, named studies, giving the argument concrete evidence rather than relying on abstract claims about research design.
- The paper maintains a consistent evaluative thread — the failure to measure trust from the subject's perspective — that ties the analysis of both studies together coherently.
- It moves beyond identifying flaws to suggesting concrete improvements, such as incorporating psychographic data and attitudinal variables, which adds constructive value to the critique.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates critical literature evaluation: the author reads published research not at face value but against a standard of what the research design should have accomplished. By identifying the gap between stated hypotheses and the broader phenomenon being studied (trust), the paper models how to assess internal validity and the real-world applicability of research findings.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief overview of its scope, then devotes its central section to analyzing hypothesis weaknesses in two specific studies side by side. A transitional section explains how flawed hypotheses constrain research outcomes and organizational decision-making. The conclusion synthesizes both critiques into a broader argument about the need for externally oriented hypothesis formation in business research. The structure is analytical rather than descriptive throughout.
Introduction
The use of primary research methods to gain insights into consumer trust of online e-tailers, the ethical decision-making styles and career strategy implications for IT professionals, and the role of organizational climate in minimizing IT professional turnover represent only a small sampling of the many areas where business research is applied today. Both primary and secondary forms of research are discussed in this paper, with specific focus on the use of primary research to gain highly specific and targeted insights. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are analyzed with respect to understanding how online consumers grant and maintain trust in e-tailers, and the role of organizational climate on IT professionals' ethics, job performance, and longevity within an organization.
Selection of Hypotheses and Research Strategies
The ultimate purpose of business research is to provide frameworks, insights, and lessons learned that guide the development of more finely tuned strategies to accomplish a business objective. In the case of academic research that focuses on a commonly held business problem — such as quantifying trust in online retailers — the academician's contributions to business strategy are particularly significant because they are foundational to change. Once the research objective is defined, the researcher must determine whether primary, secondary, or both methods of research will be employed.
In the article An Empirical Study of the Causal Antecedents of Customer Confidence in E-Tailers, secondary research is used to create a framework that will eventually be used to complete primary research and either prove or disprove the study's hypothesis (Krishnamurthy, 1). However, the hypotheses in this study are too narrowly limited to the causal factors already established in prior secondary research, and as a result they appear to reflect the past rather than attempt to define the future. For example, the first hypothesis states that the greater the ease of use, the greater the confidence a consumer will have in a website. Immediately following this statement is the observation that firms successful with their websites attempt to build long-term relationships with consumers rather than focusing solely on transactions. While ease of use is clearly critical for any consumer to want to revisit a site, there is no causality established between ease of use and long-term customer relationships. One factor is purely mechanical while the other is entirely personal — more attuned to personalization at the front of a purchasing cycle and to earned trust through successfully executed transactions.
The hypotheses in Krishnamurthy's article need significant revision before a full primary research methodology can be built to test them. Each of the six hypotheses is so inward-centric from the e-tailer's perspective that the word "trust" appears in only one of the six. There is little concern shown for what the online customer actually wants. Instead, the hypotheses constitute a listing of strategies and tactics that online e-tailers might employ in hopes of drawing customers closer. What is needed are hypotheses centered on how consumers process and interpret websites, how they construct their own internal trust frameworks, the implications of word-of-mouth on website trust, and how much a single successfully completed transaction increases trust. Crucially, the author makes no attempt to measure what detracts from trust — a fatal design error in the entire study. Understanding how customers impart trust in an online e-tailer is far more important than simply measuring the e-tailer strategies listed in this set of hypotheses.
Critique of the E-Tailer Trust Study
Both studies suffer from serious limitations. The first study's hypotheses appear to test e-tailer strategies rather than examining the emotional, cognitive, and perceptual frameworks that online customers use to validate and become loyal to websites. Most troubling is the focus on how to present an e-tailing website with sufficient functionality to "earn" trust, when in reality earning trust is a long-term process. A model of change must therefore evolve from the research. The researcher falls victim to a "one-and-done" mentality when, in fact, the discovery of a process by which e-tailers can gain trust must emerge from the research itself — not merely a series of discrete strategies. Most glaring, the researcher fails to attempt to measure what erodes trust. According to social science research on trust, understanding the conditions under which trust is lost is just as important as identifying how it is built, and omitting this dimension leaves the study's practical utility severely constrained.
The secondary research component is executed with considerable skill (Krishnamurthy, 1, 2, 3), and the literature synthesis is thorough. Nevertheless, the framework that emerges from this secondary work channels the primary research into an overly narrow set of variables that privilege the e-tailer's operational perspective over the customer's experiential one.
References
Krishnamurthy, Sandeep. An Empirical Study of the Causal Antecedents of Customer Confidence in E-Tailers. First Monday, volume 6, number 1 (January 2001). URL:
Oz, Effy. Organizational Commitment and Ethical Behavior: An Empirical Study of Information System Professionals. Journal of Business Ethics; Dordrecht; November 2001.
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