A research question is the pivot of the essay: it decides the approach, the strategy and the feasibility of the study. This chapter separates aim, objective, question and hypothesis, presents the shapes a question can take, and shows the five ways in which questions fail — and how each failure is corrected. Real research questions from the papers read in this course serve as the reference; the chapter ends with the question–strategy fit that the following chapters develop.

The funnel narrows in three steps. A topic is a broad area of interest, such as “password security”.

Research for practice has a long history in our field. McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2008) argued in the Harvard Business Review that competition in IT-intensive industries had accelerated since the mid-1990s — winners pull away faster and leaders change more often — because enterprise IT lets a firm replicate a better process across the whole organisation at once.

Oates organises the whole of research around six aspects that every study has, whether or not the author has thought about them: purpose, products, process, participants, paradigm and presentation.

A published study then illustrates all six. It then turns to the products: the forms a contribution to knowledge can take, from a taxonomy to a confirmed model, and the difference between descriptive and prescriptive knowledge.

n contrast, Mayer, Baygi and Buwalda (2025) studied one consultancy with semi-structured interviews, first with entry-level professionals and later with senior consultants and managers, using job crafting as a theoretical lens.

Creswell’s point is that these are not two boxes but the ends of a continuum: a study sits somewhere on it, and it tends towards one end more than the other. The core ideas differ.

Qualitative research refers to an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning that individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem, with data collected in the participants’ setting and analysed inductively.

Quantitative research refers to an approach for testing objective theories by examining the relationships among measurable variables, yielding numerical data that are analysed with statistics.

Last session settled that research is the creation of new knowledge through a systematic process, open to criticism.

The participation component, 20 % of the grade, is earned by annotating this script — questions, corrections and examples posted in the course group, not by speaking in the discussions; a small group project counts for another 20 %, and the essay for 60 %, of which 40 % is the written report and 20 % its presentation and discussion in the oral exam.

Both layouts are about ten pages, may be written alone or in a group of two or three, in English or Norwegian, and must state which AI tools were used and for what.