Marketing homework help
Methodology (just second research)
This section describes how you decided to answer the questions set in your objectives. There may be more than one way in which to achieve some of your objectives, e.g. by observation, by a structured or semi-structured interview or by a questionnaire, and therefore you would describe the selected method or methods. For other objectives there may be several ways in which you could achieve them. You may use several different research methods to achieve your different objectives and each should be justified in the dissertation..
Having selected your research method(s) and identified a sampling procedure and sampling frame, you should describe how you implemented them e.g. for a questionnaire you may initially use an unstructured interview to identify issues and to draw up a pilot questionnaire which can be refined before being used in the actual survey. Is it a postal questionnaire, a self-completion questionnaire, or another recognised method?
The concepts of validity and reliability should also be addressed in the methodology section. Validity is the degree to which a process or questionnaire really measures or predicts what it intended to measure or predict. Reliability refers to the degree to which a process or questionnaire consistently produces the same results. In order to fully understand these two important concepts you will need to consult a research methods or statistics text.
You will need to identify at this early stage the statistical techniques you will use for the analysis of the data, as this will help you to establish the amount of data you will need to collect. You should also critically evaluate your methodology, highlighting where they could have been improved, e.g. collecting more data, tightening the sampling frame, time and resource constraints etc.
