Change of Research Context

I have decided to change my research essay context from international joint ventures to supply alliances since I realized the difficulty of collecting evidence to support the central argument.  

First, in my former international joint venture (IJV) research context, I need to do three interviews. I need to conduct interviews with accountants in the IJV to determine how management control systems are used in IJV. I also need to interview each boundary spanner of the partners in IJV to collect information regarding to the social relationships between them, as well as the relationship between either one of them with outsiders. However, the target IJV that I am aiming to conduct interviews is in their busy seasons currently and prefers getting interviews after this busy period. This means that I could not finish the research essay within time limited. Second, I am struggling for deciding which IJV partner side should I stand for. Previous literature does not give clear guidance regarding to  which partner side should research papers stand for in IJV literature. The results of the research essays based on one partner may differ from that based on another partner. Third, theoretical definition of IJV is vague, which makes it difficult to determine an IJV.

Due to time constraint and the difficulty in collecting evidence. I decided to use supply alliances as my research context. The choice of supply alliances is for the following reasons. First, supply alliances are pervasive nowadays, which provides rich evidences pool. Second, supply alliance literature provides some guidance in relation to which partner side should a research stands on. Lastly, the identification of supply alliances is clearer than that of IJV.

Good Proposal Template

Kerry uploaded a good proposal template, which has eight closely related elements: key academic paper, research problem/gab in that academic paper, the importance of the research problem/gab in that academic paper, basic process model of to be developed, the central theory to be used, suitable evidences to fill the gab, the ways of collecting those evidences.

A good research proposal also needs logic and continuous flow of these eight elements rather than develops them as separated pieces. This means whenever we write a research paper, we have to consider the eight elements together where each element copes with each other. For example, research problem/gab in extant literature must be answered by developing a research model for which requires an appropriate theory to support. The evidence collected must be related the model we develop and be able to answer the research problem/gab. In this way, the research paper can make readers feel “comfortable” and trigger their interest of keeping on reading.

From my experience, it is not always easy to develop such a good research proposal with these eight closely related elements. Sometimes, although you have a good research problem and model, the data is hardly to collect, which force you to change your research topic. Sometimes, although you have good ways for collecting great data, you find it hard to make significant contribution to extant literature based on those available data. But this does not mean we are unable to develop a good research proposal following this template. If we can think thoroughly these elements together and conduct a sufficient amount of researches at the beginning to determine the feasibility of our thoughts, it can save lots of time when we write our research proposal.   

Experiences of First Interview

Me and Yi did three interviews last Friday. I would like to share my experience with all of you.

Overview of the interview process

Before doing interviews, we first illustrated the aim and the procedure of the interview to interviewees. Then, we assured these three interviewees that a) any information obtained in the interview will not be reported without their consent b) information obtained in the interview will be used only for the purpose of this study. Lastly, we informed these three interviewees that they would be given the report if requested. These proceudres seek to promote trust between interviewees and us so that interviewees are open amd honsty to respond our questions.  

All three interviewees are Chinese students. The first interviewee is a male and currently doing a master degree in ANU. The second interviewee is a female and currently doing a master degree in ANU. The third interviewee is a female who finished her master degree in ANU two years ago. These three interviewees were asked about their experiences of studying in ANU and living in Canberra. 

Some thoughts about the interviews 

First, these three interviewees are all my close friends. These three interviewees are willling to cooperate with us. From the interviews, I could not tell that they were inentionall hiding nor relutant to tell us information. I am curious to think whether the interviews would be so favouring if the interviewees are those who I did not know? Next time I will test this.  

Second, all these three interviewees are Chinese internatinal students who have traditional Eastern norms and values. I am wondering whether interviews results will be different if interviewees are from Western countries (e.g. Euro)? 

Third, at the first instance, me and Yi were struggling whether to design specific questions for interviewees. We finally agreed with each other that we would not design specific questions which may limit the scope of interview results. But in our real research project, since our research project focuses on specific issues, is it necessary for us to design specific issues before doing interviews? 

Fourth, I found it is quite helpful that if we could do tape recording and taking notes/memos simultaneously. This is specifically useful when we do critical analysis, which can save us a lot of time. We do not need to re-listen interview and we can pick up critial information from our notes/memos. 

Lastly, we did our first two interviews on a group context and third interview individually. We found group interviews may make interviewees more relax, which is favourable to the interview results.