Selecting a company that you are interested in researching. Find a company in a business journal and decide on a research project that would suit the company's needs. Submit this company and research topic to your instructor and wait for it to be approved before beginning to assemble your report.
Begin your report by accomplih the following sections: (York College is the what I want to do this research on)
Title Page (APA formatted) (1 page)
Introduction to the research project (Including company industry and background and what the 'topic' of the research will be. Also
include commentary on any ethical considerations that you expect to encounter) (1 - 2 pages)
Problem Statement (or what is your research trying to prove or disprove?) (1 - 2 pages)
Research Objectives (or what you hope the results of the research will do for the company) (1 - 2 pages)
References (Begin your Reference page, but add to it as needed throughout the life of the project) (1 page)
York College
You work for York College's alumni association. It is eager to develop closer ties with its aging alumni to provide strong stimuli to encourage increased donations and to induce older, nontraditional students to return to supplement enrollment. The president's office is considering starting a retirement community geared toward university alumni and asks your association to assess the attractiveness of the proposal from an alumni viewpoint. Your director asks you to divide the study into four parts.
Phase 1
First you are to report on the number of alumni who are in the appropriate age bracket, the rate of new entries per year, and the actuarial statistics for the group. This information allows the director to assess whether the project is worth continuing.
Phase 2
Your early results reveal a sufficient number of alumni to make the project feasible. The next step in the study is to describe the social and economic characteristics of the target alumni group. You review gift statistics, analyze job titles, and assess home location and values. In addition, you review files from the last five years to see how alumni responded when they were asked about their income bracket. You are able to describe the alumni group for your director when you finish.
Phase 3
It is evident that the target alumni can easily afford a retirement community as proposed. The third phase of the study is to explain the characteristics of alumni who would be interested in a university-related retirement community. For this phase, you engage the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and a retirement community developer. In addition, you search for information on senior citizens from the federal government. From the developer you learn what characteristics of retirement community planning and construction are most attractive to retirees. From the AARP you learn about the main services and features that potential retirees look for in a retirement community. From government publications you become familiar with existing regulations and recommendations for operating retirement communities and uncover a full range of descriptive information on the typical retirement community dweller.
You make an extensive report to both the alumni director and the university president. The report covers the number of eligible alumni, their social and economic standings, and the characteristics of those who would be attracted by the retirement community.
Phase 4
The report excites the college president. She asks for one additional phase to be completed. She needs to predict the number of alumni who would be attracted to the project so that she can adequately plan the size of the community. At this point, you call on the business school's research methods class for help in designing a questionnaire for the alumni. By providing telephones and funding, you arrange for the class to conduct a survey among a random sample of the eligible alumni population. In addition, you have the class devise a second questionnaire for alumni who will become eligible in the next 10 years. Using the data collected, you can predict the initial demand for the community and estimate the growth in demand over the next 10 years. You submit your final report to the director and the president.
What Dilemma Does the Manager Face?
The manager's predicament is fairly well defined in the four cases. Let's see how carefully you read and understood them. In the ClassicToys study, the manager, the senior vice president for development, must make a proposal to the president or possibly the board of directors about whether to acquire a toy manufacturer and, if one is to be acquired, which one of the six under consideration is the best candidate. In MedImage, the physicians in the group must decide whether to join the proposed managed health care plan of one of their primary insurers. In the MoreCoatings study, the owner of the paint manufacturer must decide whether to implement a new inventory management system. At York College, the president must propose to the board of directors whether to fund the development of a retirement community. How did you do? If you didn't come to these same conclusions, reread the cases before proceeding to catch what you missed.
In real life, management dilemmas are not always so clearly defined. In the MoreCoatings study, rather than pinpointing the problem as one of inventory management, the paint manufacturer's owner could have faced several issues: (1) a strike by the teamsters impacting inventory delivery to retail and wholesale customers; (2) the development of a new paint formula offering superior coverage but requiring a relatively scarce ingredient to manufacture, thereby affecting production rates; (3) a fire that destroyed the primary loading dock of the main shipping warehouse in the Midwest; (4) the simultaneous occurrence of all three events. As the research process begins with a manager's decision-making task, accurately defining the dilemma is paramount but often difficult. We outline the research process that begins this activity at the end of this chapter and address it in detail in Chapter 4.
Cooper, Donald, Pamela Schindler. Business Research Methods, 12th Edition. McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions, 03/2013. VitalBook file.
The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.