Search results

Conducting research with children and youth has become increasingly challenging in recent years. At times these difficulties come in the form of restrictions by Institutional Review Boards, funding agencies, and parents. Additionally, changes in youth culture and behavior, specifically regarding online activities and digitally mediated communications, impact the access that researchers have to children and youth communities in significant ways. In this chapter, I propose that the use of an emerging methodological technique, digital ethnography, may provide researchers with new data sources on children and youth culture. Digital ethnography combines ethnographic techniques of observation, participation, and interview with content analysis to collect rich data about online behavior, norms, expectations, and interactions. This technique not only provides researchers with sources of data that allow insight into youth culture by acknowledging the increasing importance of online and digital interactions in youth culture but may also address some of the concerns raised by IRBs and other interested parties about conducting research with children and teens. This chapter provides practical and ethical considerations of this method, as well as a discussion of limitations of data collection and access as it highlights new ways of studying youth culture, using emerging data collection techniques in innovative research projects.

A literature review or review article is an integral part of a scientific body of research which synthesizes prior knowledge and provides a holistic overview of a subject domain. While several studies emphasize the significance of literature reviews and include the guidelines for conducting a review, limited studies demonstrated different types of literature review methodologies in a comprehensive way. Accordingly, this chapter presents various types of review methodologies which includes narrative, descriptive, systematic, meta-analysis, hybrid, umbrella, scoping, theoretical, and critical reviews. In addition, the authors' skills including logical reasoning, content analysis, literature mapping, critical writing, and ethical consideration are presented. Further, quality aspects of the literature review are discussed such as the rigor and relevance of the selected studies. Overall, this chapter provides implications for researchers in understanding types of literature review methodologies along with their objectives, strengths, and weaknesses which can assist them in selecting a suitable methodology while conducting a review.

Most traditional research approaches emerge from the position that all “good” research is “objective.” While this is critical for conducting scholarly inquiry, we contend that it is equally important to acknowledge the significant impact social, cultural, and political contexts have on the research process. That is, research is a malleable process informed and influenced by broader socio-political forces. Because research is not conducted in a vacuum, researchers have a duty to consider the context within which one engages in research. It also requires the researcher to understand their position or status along with their participants’ power and expertise when undertaking research studies, particularly in cross-contexts. In this chapter, we explore the nuances – some overt others subtle – that have informed and influenced how our cross-cultural team navigated our research spaces. The authors of this chapter are a cross-cultural team comprised of a White American and a Black African academic. Both the United States and South Africa have complex histories of race relations and racial identity within their broader socio-political context which must be considered when conducting research. Therefore, to dissociate and compartmentalize aspects of our identity when conducting research in these contexts may in fact compromise scholarly insights which might emerge from these contexts.

The purpose of this research is to highlight some of the experiences and lessons learned from participating in qualitative research abroad for the first time. The chapter provides an overview of an international research trip to Cuba to study the impact of tourism on a tourist's value stance and highlights some of the feelings and emotions a researcher may experience when embarking on this type of trip. Tips for conducting research before, during and after a trip, are provided throughout the chapter.

Purpose – The goal of the chapter is to propose a different approach to conducting strategic management research in emerging market countries (EMCs) by moving away from the current practice which ignores the fundamental differences in the infrastructural context and philosophical worldviews between EMCs and the industrialized countries of the West.

Design/methodology/approach – Most of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of strategic management are based on the Western, Anglo-Saxon context. In this chapter, we argue that the differences between developed nations and EMCs are paradigmatic and extend the whole gamut from epistemological to ontological and ideological differences. These differences are typically superficially treated by investigators whose research merits are judged by their quantitative rigor and other positivist yardsticks. We borrow from the work of (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) and suggest that the choice of the research design be matched with the goal and intended outcomes of the research. For example, exploratory research intended to uncover and understand the fundamental concepts from the EMC worldview should be matched with an emic approach and phenomenology and hermeneutics research methods. Confirmatory research intended to test the generalizability of the concepts should be matched with an etic approach, and multiple case studies, questionnaires, as the most appropriate research designs.

Findings – We believe that research designs that take these factors into account are likely to deliver results that are more robust and representative of the true realities in emerging market countries. Furthermore, the bias toward empirical and quantitative approaches was clearly delineated to further support the need for a more comprehensive approach in conducting research in the field of strategic management.

Originality/value – This chapter contributes to the ongoing discourse and conversations about conducting the research in strategic management more responsive and engaging with people in emerging market countries rather than dictating to them what they need to learn and know. A more enriched discourse will likely come out of such interactions which would strengthen the discipline due to the utilization of multiple approaches to conducting research in diverse environments.

The use of structured literature review methods like bibliometric analysis is growing in the management fields, but there is limited knowledge on how they can be facilitated by technology. Hence, we conducted a broad overview of software tools, their roles, and limitations in structured (bibliometric) literature reviewing activities. Subsequently, we show that several software tools are freely available to aid in searching the literature, identifying/ extracting relevant publications, screening/assessing quality of the extracted data, and performing analyses to generate insights from the literature. However, their applications may be confronted with several challenges such as limited analytical and functional capabilities, inadequate technological skills of researchers, and the fact that the researcher's insights are still needed to generate compelling conclusions from the results produced by software tools. Consequently, we contribute toward advancing the methodologies for performing structured reviews by providing a comprehensive and updated overview of the knowledge base of key technological software tools and the conduct of structured or bibliometric literature reviews.

In this chapter, we examined issues related to research design and research management as applied to scientific research conducted in applied school settings. In terms of research design, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have an important role to play in advancing a scientific agenda for school-based research. However, given their enormous cost and complexity, it is important to carefully time their implementation in the development cycle. We suggested that the use of RCTs is most appropriate in the later stages of the development cycle when the focus is on demonstrating the efficacy and/or effectiveness of an intervention and establishing its generalizability under the real world conditions of schooling. We also recommended establishing a hierarchy of evidence for an intervention that involves implementing a cost-efficient mix of single case, quasi-experimental, and true experimental designs where appropriate and feasible. In examining issues related to the management of research and the implementation of a knowledge development agenda for schools, it has become apparent that treatment integrity is a keystone variable. We discussed the importance of treatment integrity, with attention to the impact on internal and external validity. Finally, we offered practical considerations to support high-quality, respectful school-based inquiry.

Prior research that attempts to empirically correlate research activity and effective teaching generates conflicting results. These contradictory findings contribute to the scrutiny that currently threatens to undermine accounting education and to impact funds currently directed toward the support of accounting research. The purpose of this study is to measure the impact of relevant research on students’ perceptions of effective teaching. This two-phase study incorporates both a between-subjects decision-making experiment and a ranking instrument to measure the importance of various faculty attributes of teaching effectiveness. The two factors of interest in this study are whether a hypothetical accounting professor (1) conducts and publishes relevant research and (2) incorporates relevant research into classroom lectures. The results of the first phase of the study experimentally demonstrate that students enrolled in accounting classes perceive the professor who does both (conducts and publishes relevant research and incorporates research into classroom lectures) to be significantly more effective than others. Specifically, the study identifies a statistically significant two-way interaction between the two factors of interest. This suggests that students perceive the professor's research to be a component of teaching effectiveness if, and only if, that research is incorporated into the classroom experience of the student. The second phase of the study finds that students generally rank both of the faculty research attributes lower in importance than other previously identified factors used to describe the professor.