ANSWERS

QUESTION ONE

Research is the systematic and scientific search for pertinent information on a

specific topic in other to increase our understanding in that topic or issue.

QUESTION TWO

In the first place business and management development research is a systematic

and inquiry that helps to solve business problems and contributes to
management knowledge. So what makes research a business and management
research is its help to solve business issues, practical managerial problems and
knowledge development in disciplines such as sociology, geography, economics
and statistics.

QUESTION THREE

The four purposes of research are as follows;

 To gain familiarity with a phenomenon or to achieve new insights into it. This
research is the first research to be conducted around a problem that has not yet been
clearly defined. Therefore, it aims to gain a better understanding of the exact nature of
the problem and not to provide a conclusive answer to the problem itself in other to
conduct more in-depth research later. For example: Consider a scenario where a juice
bar owner feels that increasing the variety of juices will enable increase in customers,
however he is not sure and needs more information.

To describe accurately the feathers of a particular individual, situations or a

group: This expands knowledge of a research problem or phenomenon by describing it
according to its characteristics and population. Descriptive research focuses on the
‘how’ and ‘what’, but not on the ‘why’. For example, when an apparel brand that wants
to understand the fashion purchasing trends among New York buyers will conduct a
demographic survey of this region, gather population data and then
conduct descriptive research on this demographic segment.

To test a hypothesis of a causal relationship between variables: this type of

research is also referred to as casual research, is conducted to determine how variables
interact, i.e. to identify cause-and-effect relationships. This research deals with the ‘why’
of research questions and is therefore often based on experiments. For example, you
might run an experiment and find that a certain drug is effective at treating toothaches.
But if you can't repeat that experiment, no one will take your results seriously.

To determine the frequency with which something occurs or with which it is

associated with something else. This is known as a diagnostic research studies. This
typically focuses on estimating the sensitivity and specificity of individual diagnostic test,
their predictive vales and other parameters of interest such as ROC curve test reliability
and likelihood ratios. For example, to determine whether an exercise stress test in
patients suspected of coronary artery disease has diagnostic value, one needs to
quantify whether the test changes the diagnostic probability based on previous test
results (for example, patient history and physical examination) that are commonly
available.