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Much student
written work in business and management, whether for course work
assignments or undergraduate and Masters dissertations, neglects to
consider whether the data relied on as sources for the assessed work is
academically rigorous, or indeed whether the assemblage created by the
student will itself withstand rigorous scrutiny.
This paper
categorises a number of different approaches in the literature to teaching
business students about validity, reliability and how and where to
generalise from their research. It distinguishes four categories in the
business research methods literature, which are characterised as the
positivist outlook, the phenomenological, the embedded, and the
skills-type. Informed by these different ways of dealing with the subject,
it describes three different approaches to teaching students how to assess
the validity, reliability and extent to which data they have collected and
things that they have read can be generalised.
Students tend to
look at information in isolation. When required to search for or use
information, students at both undergraduate and post-graduate level are no
longer to be found in libraries surrounded by shelved books, but in pooled
computer rooms, downloading information while exchanging messages with
friends and playing the odd online game. The modern context of study and
research thus exacerbates the problems many business and management
students seem to have of thinking about information and linking it
together. Students’ ability to question what is being collected and read
is impaired by this atomisation of information gathering, so that little
attempt is made at linkage and synthesis during the information-gathering
phase.
The aim of this
ongoing research is to establish teaching methods, which enable business
students to think about information within a context, assess the value of
the information and to become critical independent learners.
Keywords:
business, research methods, validity, reliability, teaching, learning.
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