Tilburg University
Pre-master TiSEM
Marketing Management
Marketing Analytics
Strategic Marketing
Supply chain Management
Finance
MIDTERM
14 October 2019
INDEX
Goal of a research proposal 2
Structure of the research proposal 2
Taxonomy of bloom 2
Why critical literature review? 2
Structure of academic papers 2
Reading academic papers 3
Structure of paragraphs 3
The seven-step deductive research proposal 3
The seven-step inductive research proposal 3
What is a business problem? 4
From a business problem to a problem statement 4
Literature review in deductive research 4
What makes a good business problem? 4
What is a variable? 4
Parallel vs. serial mediation model 7
Academic relevance 7
Managerial relevance 7
Writing a good background section 7
Writing a good academic relevance 8
What makes a good problem statement? 8
What makes good research questions? 8
Theoretical research questions 8
Practical research questions 8
Overarching group 9
When to use overarching groups labels vs single variable names? 9
What makes a good variable definition? 9
What is a hypothesis? 9
What makes a good hypothesis? 9
Two types of hypotheses 9
Formulation of main-effect hypothesis 10
Formulation of moderating hypothesis 10
Main effect hypothesis 10
Moderating effect hypotheses 10
Mediating effect hypotheses 10
How to write a good justification for a hypothesis? 10
How to justify a hypothesis based on theory? 11
Research proposal 1 – Fighting private labels 11
Research proposal 2 – Managing the waiting experience at CAP airlines 13
, Goal of a research proposal
- To present/justify the need to study a research problem
- To present the practical ways in which the proposed study should be conducted
Structure of the research proposal: Problem background
Problem statement
Research questions
Academic and managerial relevance
Conceptual model
Hypotheses
Taxonomy of Bloom
Why critical literature review?
- You do not run the risk of reinventing the wheel (managerial and academic relevance)
- The research effort can be contextualized in a wider academic debate (academic
relevance)
- You are able to introduce relevant terminology and to define your key terms
- Looking at the extant literature will save time and effort in the end
Structure of academic papers
- Title
- Abstract: summary of the entire article
- Keywords: tags which can be used in searches
- Introduction: background (importance), gap in knowledge
- Conceptual framework/theory: existing knowledge and expectations
- Methodology: method of collecting data
- Results (text, tables and figures): data collected is analysed
- Conclusion/discussion: interpretation of the results and setting those results in a wider
context
- Reference list: all sources used throughout the article
ACADEMIC COMPETENCES – MIDTERM 2019 2