Data Issues and Research Design in Business Studies

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.

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.

Critique of the E-Tailer Trust Study

In the study of Organizational Commitment (OC) and its role in the ethical behavior of IT professionals, the article Organizational Commitment and Ethical Behavior: An Empirical Study of Information System Professionals also contains glaring omissions in its hypothesis definitions, which in turn shape and constrain both the primary and secondary research strategies used to fulfill them (Oz, 1). First, there is no measure of the relative level of commitment and loyalty to the IT profession itself; in fact, many other studies of the relatively high turnover among IT professionals attribute this phenomenon more to task ownership than to ethics.

Second, the organizational commitment of any organization is directly linked to the transparency and trustworthiness of its senior management. Because IT functions are often considered process areas that can be outsourced with minimal disruption to core business operations, IT professionals have been known to develop applications of such complexity that their organizations have little choice but to retain them. This dynamic — the relationship between employee trust and the willingness to produce self-sufficient software applications — is a fascinating one that the study overlooks entirely. The hypothesis of how much trust IT professionals place in their management teams, and the degree to which that trust influences their willingness to produce self-sufficient code, also needs to be tested.