An Exercise to Move from Problems to Research
Moving from problems to research projects
- SUBGROUP COMPARISONS:
- How do apartment dwellers differ from homeowners in the sports they watch and pay for?
- How do traffic patterns in our web site differ from those who click through different categories of news articles?
- Which policing methods are most effective in lowering property crime in our city?
- PREDICTIVE MODELS:
- What are the purchasing patterns that indicate that a female customer is probably pregnant?
- What variables measured by the sensors inside this machine predict when it is at high risk of malfunctioning?
- How much more likely is a customer to default on the loan he/she holds with us if a new charge appears on his/her credit report?
- What factors indicate a high risk that a high-value customer may move to a competitor?
- SENTIMENT ANALYSES:
- Is employee morale adversely impacted by the new overtime pay and new healthcare copayment regulations which reduced benefits to employees?
- How is sentiment toward our brand evolving in response to our cooperation with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts?
- Is our proactive, Twitter based approach to dealing with our recent recall helping control damage from our recent public relations fiasco?
- COMPLEX MULTIVARIATE ANALYSES:
- How could our firm route our aircraft taking into account travel patterns, weather, customer demand, and competition’s routing?
- What factors should play a role in my trading for stocks algorithm, and how should I weight them?
- What factors should I consider in hiring the new CEO to turnaround this declining firm?
Now move from the problem statement to a conceptual frame that becomes your research model.
ASSIGNMENT: Pick one of the several suggested pathways, and then think of a real-life problem and develop a research project idea. Submit 1-page research idea statement with a specification of the problem and research analyses that will be conducted.