MKT5612 Chap.1 Research Problems and the Evidence Process
Research Problems and the Evidence Process
Applied marketing research begins with a decision, not a questionnaire. A broad management concern must be translated into a research problem, then into objectives and answerable questions.
Exploratory work clarifies an uncertain situation, descriptive work measures a defined market condition, and causal work tests whether a controlled change produces an outcome.
The evidence process links problem identification, research design, data collection, analysis, interpretation and communication.
Each stage constrains the next: a weak objective cannot be rescued by sophisticated analysis, while a clear decision criterion makes it easier to choose evidence and explain what the result permits. The practical discipline is traceability from the managerial decision to every question, measure and recommendation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Management decisions and research problems
- 02
Exploratory, descriptive and causal purposes
- 03
Research objectives and answerable questions
- 04
The six-stage evidence process
- 05
Design choices and decision criteria
- 06
Traceability from evidence to recommendation
Worked example · free
Turn a coffee-kiosk concern into a research brief
- 3State the management decision and separate it from the research problem.
- 3Write two measurable research objectives.
- 4Choose an initial purpose and evidence sequence with a reason.
Key terms
- Management Decision
- The action choice facing a decision maker, expressed as what the organisation should do rather than what the researcher should measure.
- Research Problem
- A precise statement of the information gap that must be resolved to support a management decision.
- Research Objective
- A specific statement of what the study will determine, compare, describe or test.
- Exploratory Research
- Flexible inquiry used to clarify an ambiguous problem, discover ideas and develop propositions for later measurement.
- Descriptive Research
- Structured research used to estimate characteristics, frequencies or associations in a defined population.
- Causal Research
- Research designed to test whether changing one factor produces a change in another under controlled conditions.
Research Problems and the Evidence Process FAQ
Why should a research brief begin with a decision?
A decision specifies what the evidence must enable. Starting with a preferred method invites irrelevant data collection, whereas a clear action choice exposes which uncertainty matters, what comparison is needed and how accurate the answer must be.
Can one project be exploratory and descriptive?
Yes. A project can use an exploratory phase to identify language and candidate explanations, then a structured descriptive phase to estimate how common those explanations are. The phases serve different purposes and should not be treated as interchangeable evidence.
When is a causal design justified?
A causal design is justified when the decision depends on the effect of a manipulable factor, competing explanations can be controlled, and the organisation can implement a credible treatment and comparison. Association alone does not meet those conditions.
Exam move
For every case, draw a four-line chain: decision, information gap, objective and design. Then challenge each arrow by asking whether the next line actually answers the previous one. Practise classifying objectives by purpose, but always justify the classification with the uncertainty being resolved. In timed work, a precise two-sentence problem definition usually earns more analytical value than a long list of methods.
Finish by naming the recommendation boundary: what the proposed evidence could support and what would still require another stage. Build a small bank of commercial symptoms and rewrite each one as two different decision problems; this shows why the same falling-sales fact can support pricing, distribution or communication research.
For each rewrite, supply one exploratory objective, one descriptive objective and one causal objective, but cross out any objective the case does not yet justify. Finally, rehearse a thirty-second audit aloud: who decides, which alternatives are live, what is unknown, which observation discriminates among them, and what action changes. If the final answer is vague, return to the problem definition instead of adding techniques.
This routine makes method choice a consequence of the decision rather than a display of memorised vocabulary.
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