8.2 Discussion

This course has predominantly focused on qualitative methods. Other courses in your DBA program, like BADM-707 (Data Analytics), focus on quantitative methods. These two methodological approaches are often presented as dichotomous, all-or-nothing choices. You must either use a quantitative or a qualitative approach. You are either a quantitative or qualitative researcher. Fortunately, this is not the case! Your choices aren’t quite so limited. With this assignment, we will consider complementary research approaches, what are sometimes called Mixed Methods.

Upon successful completion of this discussion, you will be able to:

Analyze a given problem scenario to determine an appropriate, aligned research approach.

Understand how methodological approaches can be mixed to be complimentary.

Background Information

In your course textbook, the authors state,

There are creators of knowledge who perform investigations by keeping, more or less strictly, inner-paradigmatically, to one of the methodological approaches. It is also common in practice, however, to approach what we refer to as ‘a view as transformative operator in a methodology or complementarity.’ (Arbnor & Bjerke, 2009, pp. 328-329)

• Difficult research problems often require novel, complementary approaches. As we have learned, the choice of “best” methodological approach depends on the situation, not on the researcher’s personal preferences. So, you must be prepared to utilize a broad range of techniques. To be an effective researcher, you must build a complete toolkit.
• With this assignment, we are returning to our familiar example scenario. But this time, you will approach the problem with a full arsenal of research weapons at your disposal. Below is the example scenario again for your consideration:

Example Scenario 

Imagine you are a student in a well-respected DBA program. To meet your graduation requirements, you need to demonstrate your research acumen by completing a research project with a partner organization.

The partner organization you have selected has a serious retention problem. Even though the company has a strong reputation and pays its employees well above market rates, turnover has been a consistent issue. Despite several major recruiting drives, the company has been unable to back-fill lost employees quickly enough to meet its customers’ demands. This is starting to lead to frustrated customers and lost business.

Your partner organization has asked you to identify the root cause of their retention problem and to recommend a solution. The company is large and complex, with well over 20,000 employees spread throughout the globe. They have provided you with access to all their internal data on this issue, including their HR database with demographic information, training records, employee performance reviews, and the detailed results of the past several years’ worth of employee satisfaction surveys. In your initial review of this secondary data, you discover that the job satisfaction of the employees is actually rather high, despite the poor turnover.