QUESTION 3

Discuss and evaluate two different methodological approaches (e.g. non-experimental, experimental, predictive, case study, phenomenology, generic, etc.) that could be used to investigate your school-approved dissertation topic. Propose a research question that would align with each approach and explain why the questions would be worded differently. Compare and contrast the scholarly rationale for the two chosen approaches describing the strengths, weaknesses, and ethical issues associated with each. Recommend a process by which a pragmatic researcher might choose between the two approaches.

Research Method

The purpose of my research is to use a qualitative case study approach to understand why managers in the digital media industry adopt CI as a management strategy to drive product and process innovation to improve profitability. The study sample consists of 50 managers from a digital advertising firm located in the Silicon Valley area in California who have applied CI improvement to their product improvement projects and who did so to improve profitability for their products. Because the proposed case study aims to understand the relationship between CI and profitability, only managers in the selected digital advertising firm in the United States who are responsible for improving the digital platforms to improve profitability for the selected company will be selected for an interview.

Such managers included marketing, product development, monetization, yield experimentation, and consumer reporting for business intelligence. Managers whose responsibilities are outside the roles of delivering on profitability goals (e.g. engineering, software engineering, and finance will be excluded) from the study. The practical implication of the research would improve how managers could adopt CI as a corporate strategy to achieve profitability goals, improve product and process quality, increase customer satisfaction, and achieve higher revenue.

This chapter covers explanation of the research design and rationale, evaluation of the research question, comparison and contrast of the selected research design with an alternative research design. I also provided an evaluation of the research question in this chapter. In addition, this chapter contains recommendations for the researcher who wants to reproduce the study.

Case Study vs Experimental

The topic of CI has been researched extensively by scholars. Some of these studies are qualitative and others are quantitative. In this section, I offer some insights on the impact of using either a qualitative case study or a quantitative experimental research approach to the study. The dissertation title approved for my research is “continuous improvement and profitability: A case study of middle managers in a firm in the United States’ digital advertising industry.”

Qualitative research is a holistic and interpretive form of inquiry (Anderson, 2017) grounded in, to some extent, critical theory and constructivism. The research design is a case study. The case study design addresses the goal of understanding a phenomenon using a real-life context as the basis of reconstruction (Wrona & Gunnesch, 2016). Continuous improvement is an innovative strategy requiring managers to use a complex decision-making process to arrive at solutions. Using a case study design for the study and using techniques such as open-ended questionnaires and interviews, the participants in this proposed research will be able to provide in-depth insights on how their CI decision-making process leads to improvement in profitability. A research study into CI’s impact on organizational learning in small and medium enterprises (Matthews, MacCarthy, & Braziotis, 2017) emphasized that interpretive case studies are suitable when looking to gain a deep understanding of organizational strategies.

An experimental study could also be applied to the study of continuous improvement. Several authors have followed the quantitative path to

Research Question: Qualitative

For qualitative research, the topic of this study is framed like this: “Do managers adopt CI as a management strategy to drive product and process innovation to improve profitability?”

Research Question: Quantitative

For quantitative research, the topic of this study is this way: “How do managers measure the impact of continuous profitability improvement?”

Methodology Similarities: Case Study and Experimental

Methodology Contrasts: Case Study and Experimental

Recommendation to the Researcher

References

Anderson, V. (2017). Criteria for Evaluating Qualitative Research. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 28(2), 125–133. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21282

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