Peer Review

An introduction to Business Research Methods

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Feb 3, 2020 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

NOTE: This is a BookBoon publication and you have to provide your email address to access it. Students are granted free access.

This open textbook has been recently revised/updated, and covers the basic content of business research. Business research topics include: an overview of research problems and questions, strategies for writing literature reviews, qualitative and quantitative research methods and data analysis, business research ethics, selecting population samples, designing questionnaires, conducting interviews and focus groups, participant observation, and forecasting methods in business practice.

This material is designed to provide coverage of the main concepts in business research. As such, it is broad in content and approach, but not necessarily overly detailed in content. It could serve as a reference for student use, or textbook for a business/marketing research course.

Type of Material:

Open (Access) Textbook

Recommended Uses:

Could be used as a required text for a marketing or business research course.
Could be used as a supplemental text
Good personal reference item for students to keep in their professional library.

Technical Requirements:

Download as PDF from this site

Used Chrome

Identify Major Learning Goals:

To understand what business research is
To learn the differences between qualitative and quantitative research
Be able to design questionnaires
To learn to conduct interviews
Be able to forecast

Target Student Population:

College Upper Division, Graduate School, Professional
Marketing Research class
Business Research class

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Basic business statistics, and marketing fundamentals would be extremely beneficial foundation knowledge. The material specifically focuses on business research, rather than research methods/methodology in general. As such, basic foundational business classes will be helpful.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

Content is accurate, well-written, well-organized
12 chapters that are logically laid out
Each chapter includes both learning objectives and references,
Easy to read and review.
Authors make it clear to differentiate business research from general research
Key graphics and links to additional content when warranted

Concerns:

While learning objectives are present for each chapter/content, some are not well-written
Instructors may want to write custom learning objectives before assigning materials.
End-of-chapter review questions are minimal in content and coverage.
Content is perhaps less detailed than what one might find in a for-profit textbook and includes fewer examples that would further aid in student understanding.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

Authors present the topics of discussion in the order they believe is pertinent, but the material is flexible, and content can be covered in any order most relevant to the particular situation
The material is well-designed, and easy to read/review.
Illustrations and graphics are of high quality.
Discussion/review questions at the end of the chapters should help students identify main concepts covered in each chapter.
Students reading this text could learn a great deal in a short amount of time, as each chapter covers the basic information needed for the topic.

Concerns:

Not all learning objectives are written from a measurable perspective and could be improved. Simply stating students will "understand topc...." is not measurable, nor direct.
Additional, and more in-depth discussion/review questions at the end of each chapter would be helpful.
An index of terminology would be helpful. A list of important terms with definitions would also provide additional learning support.
As a free text, this does not include many of the instructor resources common to for-profit texts, such as Powerpoint slides, test banks, instructor manuals, etc.
The text does not have the examples more commonly found in the for-profit texts.
Instructors may find that they have to create additional depth to ensure student comprehension.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The layout is clear, clean and consistent throughout the book.
It is easy to navigate the material from page-to-page and from the indexing tool.
Users have the capability to highlight content, general bookmarks, and to adjust the size of the text.
This text can either be downloaded as a PDF or read entirely online which lends to both its portability and user-friendliness.
In the online version, students have the ability to bookmark, highlight and change the font size of the content.

Concerns:

There is very little interaction, beyond reading the summary review questions. A
Engagement with content is the responsibility of the instructor and/or students.
The site omits the student resources common to for-profit texts, i.e. multiple-choice quizzes to confirm understanding. The text, though written in an engaging manner, is visually basic – there are fewer graphics, color, etc. than one would find in a traditional text. For visual learners, this may be a drawback.

Other Issues and Comments:: The randomly place advertising graphics may be distracting to students, so instructors should address this with students before assignment of readings.
Creative Commons: