Master in Business Administration
Data Collection and Analysis
Learning Outcomes
By successfully completing this course, students will:
- Identify key challenges in Research Design of Business Analytics.
- Be able to construct and evaluate data collection instruments, such as surveys.
- Competently choose appropriate scales in survey design recognizing the impact of their choices to data quality.
- Be able to associate specific instruments to the research questions of choice and the challenges of data collection.
- Recognize the challenges in questionnaire wording and biases associated to questions.
- Gain a good understanding of experimental controls and the difference with data collected by observation.
- Expand their knowledge of data graphical summaries and data visualization.
- Recognize trends and observe associations in data analysis.
- Be introduced to the emergence of new type of systematic data, such as multilevel, network and web generated.
- Consider the ethical concerns in the collection and manipulation of data
Detailed Course Content
In this course we will examine key issues affecting competent Data Collection. These fall broadly under the remit of research design. We will focus on an understanding of the methodological challenges in collecting and analyzing data as well as the ability to competently interpret it and represent it.
A number of key challenges to data analysts will also be explored. These include the ethics of doing research; method and data triangulation; advanced methodologies for data analysis like network analysis and the debate on the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy.
We will employ sections from two well respected textbooks supplemented by a number of readings of journal articles and chapters from other methodology texts. The key readings are indicated in this document. There will be supplementary reading for those interested in gaining depth.
