Week 5 Exam Flashcards
Being ciritcal in writing Results, Findings:
1) Report the results without inflating them
2) Be as transparent as possible - share your data (use in text and appendix)
3) Research ethics is the key:
Only report what truly was found
Do not report results selectively in order to prove your hypothesis
Respect confidentiality and anonymity of your respondents
If you re-use data that is used in other studies – report this
Discussion:
Discussion is about making judgments about your studies - not just present facts
Most crucial part (difficult to write) - demonstrates the critical thinking of you as researcher
1) good practice to remind research objective
2) Explain whether and how research objective was achieved
3) Structure of this explanation may vary depending on the type of research, research objective, personal preferences, etc.:
* E.g., if using comparative case studies – you may formulate propositions for theory
building (elaboration)
* In theory-testing research you explain whether your hypotheses were confirmed, etc
4) Start with focus on your research then broaden towards theoretical contributions
5) Engage in dialogue with the literature added in LR
What role does LR play in Discussion:
You interpret your findings and compare to the existing body of knowledge that you identified
Possible contributions to the theory:
1) your results confirm and extend previous findings
2) Your results contradic prior findings
3) Your results add new theoretical knowledge
4) Your research creates new questions
It is okay to add new literature if no dialogue in discussion can be created
Contributions to the theory:
What do you results/findings add to the existing knowledge:
1) You can contribute to theory (confirm, extend findings, or disprove)
2) You can also improve or come up with other ways to do analysis
3) can also contribute by adding knowledge in a very novel context
Typically you write 2-3 contributions:
1) You start with the most important one: research objective was right (relevant and novel)
2) One (maybe extensive) paragraph per contribution
3) Make sure to connect contributions to existing literature
Contributions to practice:
Not all types of research produce equally convincing results:
1) Exploratory and theory building may give contextual insights
2) Theory testing are more convincing but less contextual
3) decision science - very contextual and applicable
Do not inflate the findings
Think to which types of organizations are your findings relevant to, and even departments and teams
Typically 2-4 recommendations
Limitations:
Limitations should be very serious problems with methodological quality (should be adressed)
They stem from research design rather (objective, method chosen, data, approach to analysis)
Every study has some limitations
Common limitations include:
1) Study in a very specific context or one industry
2) The way concepts are operationalized and measured
3) Researching through cross-sectional study
4) small or non-random sample
Future research directions often stem from limitations or interesting findings that lead to new questions.
Being critical when writing your discussion chapter:
1) Evaluate contributions to theory in a humble way (do not overstate)
2) Be respectful in the dialogue with the previous studies, even if results disprove
3) If you provide suggestions, be critical about the strenght (small samples are less convincing, and experiments provide causal relationships not surveys)
4) Recognize limitations of your studies
Ethics - key imperatives (characteristics)
1) Avoid harm and do good
2) Repect for persons
3) Protect confidentiality
4) Avoid deception
Code of conduct + moral compass
Ethics as compliance:
With existing norms - of research, community, academic field, journal
1) expectations about transparency
2) Confidentiality
3) recognition of work of others
with institutional standards (codes of conduct):
1) Not exhaustive list of rules, but key guiding principles and imperatives
With applicable legislation:
1) e.g. GDPR
Ethics as responsibility towards different stakeholders:
1) Respondents
2) Research community and readers
3) Research clients/sponsors
4) Research team/fellow researchers
Ethics as responsibility towards respondents:
Before study:
1) explain research reasons/benefits to avoid deception
2) Obtain informed consent
After study: Debriefing
1) Explanation of any deception
2) Explanation of the research project and goals
3) Post-study sharing results
4) offer to review interview notes or case summary
Ethics as responsibility towards research clients:
Clients/sponsors:
1) organization that offer real case/study but no payments
2) organization that engage in a contract (paid) reshearch for a problem
3) Organizations that finance research (make it happen) without offering a problem to work on
Right to confidentiality:
1) Name non-disclosure
2) purpose non-disclosure
3) Findings non-disclosure
4) especially important for sensitive/competitive issues
Right to high quality:
1) Researcher must offer suitable research design, strategy to client
2) Results are true and valid and not what client wants to hear
3) Chaning data and ommitting results from clients requests violates ethics
4) responsibility lies with the researcher
Ethics as responsibility towards own research team:
Adequate individual input:
1) each individual works towards research objective and recognizes ones biases
2) to be co-author must honestly and thoroughly contribute
Joint responsibility for confidentiality:
1) every researcher is responsible for protecting participants and sponsors as well as other team members
Ethics as responsibility towards research community/readers:
Designing, conducting, writing about research in the best possible manner:
1) no research perfect, but best effort expected
2) Following guidelines and applying clear good practices/avoiding practices that lead to questionable results
3) Being critical about research limitations
Protecting the research community reputation:
1) Every researcher is responsible for the overall research reputation by ensuring the research results are a truthful reflection of reality
Providing good input for decision making:
1) Research output is used in decision making; untruthful research output can lead to wrong decisions
Best practices of ethical empirical research:
Quantitative studies:
1) Hypothesis before data is collected
2) Defining measurement instruments and multi-item constructs before data is collected
3) Collecting data to test hypothesis
4) Defining rules for excluding data points before study is conducted
5) providing transparency about how and why data is excluded
6) Including all confounding variables
7) Providing transparency with respect to all relevant details of the study
Qualitative studies:
1) Define measurements before data is collected
2) Collecting data to specifically answer the question of the study
3) Defining ways to maximise objectivity upfront
4) Transparency to how and why data points were excluded
5) Including all variables that might confound the relationship(s) of interest / check the uncoded parts of the data to see if that data provides an alternative explanation
6) Providing transparency with respect to all relevant details of applied research appraoch
Examples of unethica behavior to be avoided:
1) Deception - not informing key stakeholders about thekey attributes
2) Speculation - making claims that your data does not support
3) Neglect - failing to acknowledge limitations
4) HARKing - hypothesing after the results
5) P-hacking - torturing data until 0.05 p value achieved
6) Biased sampling
7) Design deficiencies - Major design flaws, such as not including control groups in experiments
8) Fabrication - creating fake data
9) falsification - deleting data
10) plagiarism - present work of others as your own.
The us of AI in research:
Risks:
1) Low quality content
2) Plagiarism
3) Personal data or datasets uploaded in chat is breach of confidentiality
Best practices:
1) In the background - to brainstorm, or improve text
2) Check suggestions and add your own critical thinking
3) Be transparent how you used technology
