From problem to question

Introduction to Social Research Methodology

Author

Affiliation

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

Aim

This exercise practises the two core skills from today’s session: turning a managerial problem into research questions that serve a clearly identified goal — exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory — and diagnosing and repairing the flaws that make research questions fail. Everything is set in the world of Meridian, the company your research team is advising this semester.

The Meridian vignette

Read the briefing below carefully. Every answer you write today must be grounded in it.

Meridian is a mid-sized Polish retail-and-services company: around 450 employees, 32 stores across the country, and a growing e-commerce arm. Two years ago, annual staff turnover stood at 14%; it now stands at 27%. Customer satisfaction scores have been falling over the same period, in stores and online alike. Inside the company, theories abound: some managers blame pay, others the new rota system introduced during the e-commerce expansion, others “the attitude of young hires”. None of these theories has been tested. The board wants evidence, not hunches, and has commissioned your team to provide it. It has granted you access to personnel records, staff, and customer feedback data.

Task 1: three questions, three goals (20 minutes, pairs)

The board’s worry — “people keep leaving and customers are unhappy” — is a problem, not a research question. Your job is to translate it.

Draft three research questions based on the vignette:

1. one exploratory question,
2. one descriptive question,
3. one explanatory question.

For each question, add one sentence of justification explaining how the question serves its goal — what kind of knowledge it would produce, and why that is the exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory kind.

Requirements:

• Each question must be answerable with the access the board has granted (personnel records, staff, customer feedback data).
• Each question must pass the four criteria from today’s session: answerable, focused, feasible, non-trivial.
• Apply the sharpest single test before you write anything down: can you describe the evidence that would answer this question — and could that evidence realistically be gathered?

Write your questions so that the three together could form the first deliverable to the board: the translation of its worry into a researchable programme.

Task 2: diagnose and repair (25 minutes, pairs)

Each of the eight research questions below — all proposed, in our scenario, by enthusiastic but untrained Meridian managers — contains at least one of the flaws discussed today: double-barrelled, leading, value-laden, unanswerable, too broad, trivial, not researchable, or prediction without mechanism.

For each question:

• (a) name the flaw (or flaws — some questions manage more than one);
• (b) explain in one sentence why it is a flaw — which of the four criteria it violates;
• (c) rewrite the question so that it is answerable, focused, feasible, and non-trivial, while staying as close as possible to what the manager presumably wanted to know.

The eight questions:

1. “How satisfied are Meridian’s employees with their pay and their opportunities for promotion?”
2. “Why does Meridian’s outdated rota system force our best salespeople to resign?”
3. “Is it fair that e-commerce staff can work from home while store staff cannot?”
4. “Would Meridian’s turnover have stayed at 14% if the company had never launched its e-commerce arm?”
5. “What influences how people behave at work?”
6. “Do Meridian employees whose overtime goes unpaid feel less happy about their overtime than those who are paid for it?”
7. “Should Meridian close its five worst-performing stores?”
8. “Will staff turnover at Meridian fall next year?”

Task 3: plenary discussion (10–15 minutes)

We will compare answers as a group. As we do, keep three questions in view:

• Where you and another pair named different flaws in the same question — are you actually disagreeing, or has the question committed more than one sin?
• Several of your rewrites will have quietly changed the question’s goal (for instance, from explanatory to descriptive). Was that a loss, or exactly the right repair?
• Look back at your Task 1 questions. Would any of them survive Task 2 treatment at the hands of another pair?

Before you leave

Take out the sentence you wrote at the end of last week’s exercise — the workplace decision based on intuition, and the question that would test it. Diagnose your own question: name any flaws it commits, and write the repaired version underneath. Keep both versions — in session 3 we will turn repaired questions like yours into hypotheses and variables.