General provisions

Master programme course

Learning outcomes

The broad goal of Method is to give you the competence to formulate and carry out a specific research design.

The specific goals of Method are:

1. To develop your capacity to understand and carry out business research projects.

2. To build your skills in conducting a research project and thus also in formulating research questions, writing hypotheses, operationalizing your hypotheses and collecting and analysing data.

3. To give you hands-on experience in formulating research questions, operationalizing your question, and collecting and analysing data.

4. To acquaint you with various approaches to data collection and analysis.

5. To heighten your awareness of the consequences of the choices you make when formulating your question, and when collecting and analysing data.

Content

This course is designed around the basic idea that the method must be tailored to the research problem. No matter how you formulate your research question, there are always some common considerations to meet. We are going to cover the following topics: (1) how to formulate and motivate a research question; (2) how to formulate a working hypotheses; (3) how to operationalise that hypothesis; (4) how to design questionnaires, interview guides, observations and search strategies for secondary sources; (5) how to use the tools and techniques of qualitative and quantitative analysis; and (6) how to argue for and discuss a particular research design.

Instruction

1. Lectures by the instructors.

2. Practising the tasks of doing research through a series of seminars.

3. Individual written assignments.

4. Writing a research proposal (working in pairs).

Assessment

Your performance will be evaluated on the basis of your participation in class discussions and satisfactory completion of the individual assignments and the research proposal. Swedish grades U, G and Vg are supplemented by ECTS grades A,B,C,D,E and F. You will find details about grading in the syllabus.