Res 431

RES 341

Week 1 Lecture

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Welcome to the world of research and statistics. As mentioned in my welcoming post, this course is quite unique in that it isn't all research and it isn't all statistics, but a combination of both. In the first two weeks, we cover a great deal of the research principles and terminology. Then, in the latter part of Week 2 and henceforth, we are dealing primarily with statistics.

I can say the e-text we are using for both disciplines are very good texts. The research material is being primarily taken from a text entitled "Business Research Methods for Business (4th Ed)" by Uma Sekaran. The statistics material is extracted from "Applied Statistics in Business and Economics (1st Ed)" by David P. Doane and Lori E. Seward. There are two supplements to this text we used to use: the first is called "Basic Statistics Using Excel for Office XP" (Available through a link on your Resource page) by Merchant, Goffinet, and Koehler and the second is a book by J.B. Orris, “Basic Statistics using Excel and MegaStat” . If you check with Amazon.com or one of the online bookstores, I am sure you could purchase either one of these texts. I think Using Excel is one of the best step by step books to teach you how to use Excel with statistics and the MegaStat text is actually available piecemeal through a link on your Resource Page under Week 1.

Now, we can continue on with the lecture. I typically do not parrot the text, nor do I repeat much of it. I generally like to explain things in my own way, so that you can get a different perspective on a subject. Some of my lectures do work out problems step by step so you can get a chance to see a problem worked out. However, in this first week, there aren't any problems to do, only research principles and terminology to learn.

The first several sections in the text give us an overview of what business research is and why it is important to decision makers. For individuals involved in large corporations where...