Page 86 - DMGT209_QUANTITATIVE_TECHNIQUES_II

Unit 6: Research Design

Introduction Notes

Suppose a manufacturer of a quality machine finds sales disappointing and believes that they
may be helped by the development of point of purchase display. The contemplated display is
expensive but the manufacturer would like to try it out first on a limited basis to be sure that it
stimulates more sales and profits than it costs. This can be achieved through a better planning
and formulation of a good strategy. According to Kerlinger, “Research design is the plan,
structure and strategy of investigation conceived so as to obtain answers to research questions
and to control variance”.
Research design is in fact the conceptual structure within which the research is conducted.
Bernard Philips has described the research design as a “blue print for the collection, measurement
and analysis of data”.

6.1 Meaning

Research design is simply a plan for a study. This is used as a guide in collecting and analyzing
the data. It can be called a blue print to carry out the study. It is like a plan made by an architect
to build the house, if a research is conducted without a blue print, the result is likely to be
different from what is expected at the start. The blue print includes (1) interviews to be conducted,
observations to be made, experiments to be conducted data analysis to be made. (2) Tools used
to collect the data such as questionnaire (3) what is the sampling methods used.
Research design can be thought of as the structure of research – it is the “glue” that holds all of
the elements in a research project together. A successful design stems from a collaborative
process involving good planning and communication.
Research Design is mainly of three types namely, exploratory, descriptive and causal research.
Exploratory research is used to seek insights into general nature of the problem. It provides the
relevant variable that need to be considered. In this type of research, there is no previous
knowledge; research methods are flexible, qualitative and unstructured.

Notes The researcher in this method does not know “what he will find”.
Descriptive research is a type of research, very widely used in marketing research. Generally in
descriptive study there will be a hypothesis, with respect to this hypothesis, we ask questions
like size, distribution, etc.
Causal research, this type of research is concerned with finding cause and effect relationship.
Normally experiments are conducted in this type of research.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. .................................. is simply a plan for a study.
2. ........................... research is used to seek insights into general nature of the problem.

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