The main objectives of doctoral research

The evaluators verify certain important research results for the Ph.D.
(a) The main objective of the effort to obtain a doctorate should be the creation of new knowledge.
(b) The knowledge should be useful to industry or the academic community.
(c) It should bridge the gap between what is current knowledge and what is required.
(d) It should clear suspicions or find answers to the main questions that have been on the minds of professionals and academics for quite some time. These questions are called “dilemmas” or “hypotheses.”

What does not qualify to be called ‘doctoral research’:
1. Gathering material from different sources and writing a voluminous book does not qualify to be called ‘PhD research’. PhD research is not about writing a book.

2. Writing a thesis based on some books or some newspaper articles or Internet sites is not a doctoral research.

3. The PhD is not a survey with a few questions (such as: Are you married? How many children do you have? How long are you employed? What soap do you prefer?) Or some kind of feedback to fill out a form. The research should use standard instruments (also called measures, scales, standard scales, and published scales).

How to conduct research for a doctorate in management studies?
1. The researcher has to do an extensive review of the literature; you have to download up to 500 research articles from online libraries like: ebscohost, emeraldinsight, proquest, jostor, etc. The main purpose of the literature review is: identification of research gaps. It means you need to understand where the existing investigation stopped or what was left unexplored. The gap thus found can be converted into a hypothesis.

2. Hypothesis formulation (hypothesis formulation or hypothesis identification) is the most critical part of the investigation. Hypotheses are the research questions or dilemmas faced by the academic community and waiting to be solved by an academic like you.

3. A hypothesis looks like a question. For example, “Are women more satisfied than men in their jobs?” it is a hypothesis. This is just one example. (This may have already been solved by an academic researcher like you.) Ideally, a doctoral thesis should include the resolution of 10 to 50 most critical and interesting hypotheses.

4. The literature review reveals which hypotheses have already been solved and you don’t have to solve them again. Literature does not mean anything that you find in newspapers, magazines, websites, textbooks, etc. The literature should mainly include articles based on empirical research. Empirical research is that which is carried out from experiments, observations and data collected with scientifically developed research instruments. Research articles are found in academic journals, particularly online journals published by online libraries such as emeraldinsight, jstor, proquest, ebscohost, etc.

5. The literature review, if done diligently, will provide the investigator with an adequate basis for their research for logical documentation. The background presented in the thesis will explain how the topic or research question evolved or how it was understood until now, where it is now and what the researcher is going to do about it.

6. The literature review provides: (1) research questions / hypotheses, (2) justification of the study / research topic.

7. It goes without saying that the research topic should be identified only after an extensive review of the literature. It is quite sad that universities ask for research topics and hypotheses at the time of the enrollment application itself (at a time when the candidate has not yet read a single research article). Ideally, universities should have identified research questions / hypotheses; but this is never the case with our universities here.

8. When conducting a literature review, important findings should be taken into account. These notes are the main part of the thesis under titles such as: introduction, background, literature review, etc. All the articles mentioned must be duly listed in References. There must be cross-links between the articles noted in the reference list and the thesis text. What you write down in the main text is called an “in-text citation.” It means that if you have something in the reference list, it should appear in the main text. The in-text citation looks like this (for example): (Meesala, 2011). This should be expanded in the reference list. The way these references are annotated is called, ‘academic reference style’, ‘academic format’, ‘academic style’, etc.

9. The reference style follows a certain order when noting the names of the authors, the year of publication, and so on. and also the score. Read the information by searching Google. There are many academic formats like Harvard style, APA style, MLA style, CMS style, etc.

10. Referencing your thesis is very easy if you are familiar with the use of ‘References’ in MS Word 2007.

What to do after hypothesis identification?

If no hypotheses are identified, there is no research at all. Research on management issues is about solving hypotheses, not writing books, of course. Hypothesis formulation is followed by research design. The research design consists of determining how to collect the data (primary data) and how it should be analyzed.

When the hypotheses are clearly identified, the constructs are clearly identified and available at your fingertips. (Examples of constructs are: personality type, job satisfaction, commitment, commitment and innovative behavior). In your research based on your hypotheses, you may have to deal with 15 to 20 constructs. For each construct, there is a specific, standard, published instrument (also called a “questionnaire,” “measure,” or “scale”). An instrument is a set of questions whose reliability and validity are already established. Visit this site to see some stopovers. This is an electronic manual of management scales.

You can find many marketing scales in a book if you are affiliated with a large library like the Indian School of Business. Search Google for “Marketing Scales.”

What to do if no ready research scales are found in published journals / books?
It is not possible to find a scale for every construct related to your research.

You have to build the scale yourself.
The process is: (1) hold a meeting of some experts and, with their help, generate as many statements as possible, about that particular construct. Remove all duplicates. With the remaining items, conduct a pilot survey. Perform item analysis by organizing all responses to an item in ascending order and finding the t-statistic for two sets of extreme responses. If the t-value is 1.75 or more, the item is good and can be retained. After that, for all elements of the construct, find out Cronbach’s alpha. If Cronbach’s alpha is greater than 0.60, the construct is reliable. Reliability means that the items (statements in the questions) are well correlated. It is the average of the correlations from one item to another. In addition, the researcher must calculate the content validity index. If the index is greater than 4.00, the scale can be considered a valid scale. Search Google for the content validity index.

It should be noted that the questionnaire should relate to hypotheses but not to questions that occur to the mind of an innocent investigator.
The instrument, of course, should contain a section consisting of questions about the profile of the respondents, such as age, gender, income, length of service, etc. The data on these elements can be verified later to verify their relationship with other constructs.

Determination of sample size

Sample means the number of respondents from whom the responses to the questionnaires should be taken (with how many respondents the questionnaires will be administered).
The sample size must be large enough. The number can be in the range of 200 to 1000. Only a large sample is valid and valuable. Research conducted on a large sample only earns the respect of academics and the academic research community.
The sample size is determined by the population size, the expected standard deviation, and the confidence interval. They are formulated for the determination of samples. They are: Cocheran’s formula and Slovin’s formula. To learn more about them, Google those terms and use the formulas.
An important point to keep in mind is that the validity of your research improves with a random sample, but not by selecting respondents for convenience.

Tabulation and analysis

All collected responses must be entered into an Excel sheet. A row must be assigned to enter the data provided in a questionnaire. For 500 completed questionnaires, 500 rows must be assigned. The data entered in the Excel sheet can easily be imported into SPSS for analysis.

Data tabulation is facilitated through the use of MS Excel. For high-quality analysis, use SPSS (Statistical Procedures for the Social Sciences). Even without SPSS software, you can also use the MS Excel data analysis toolkit. With the help of this, descriptive statics, regression analysis, inter-correlations, Anova tests, etc. Can be done.

Written report
For report writing, paragraph writing skills, table of contents crafting and thesis statement crafting, linked / transition sentences, linked words, topic sentence, etc. they are critical. In particular, the English language must be idiomatic and grammatically correct.