What is Ethnography??

• Ethnography is a form of qualitative research, developed by anthropologists and sociologists to describe a society, group or culture.
• The researcher becomes immersed in group that is goes native and lives with small group of people in specific setting to record, categorize and code what is going on to provide a holistic picture of the group (Sanday 1979).
• An example of marketing ethnographic study is in Dunnett and Arnold (1999) : Jane wanted to investigate how the strong organizational culture of the retailing giant Wal-Mart impacted upon customer satisfaction.

Advantage in the research:

• Can provide significant understanding of the phenomena being researched as well as produce new, previously unrecognized phenomena and insights.
• May build relationship between company and customer.
• The company can make improvement for their weakness or lack of services.

Challenges of this research:

• The different background of people such their occupation may cause the bias for the data.
• The questionnaire must distributed to many number of people, so the result will be more accurate.

During the presentation of Research Methodology For Economics & Business by the senior, I asked some questions. These are the questions and answers followed by their topic.

1) For topic : The impact of participative management on organizational performance & employee effectiveness.

Researcher by : 
Laura Chang Leng Yi


Question : Why do you choose this topic for your research?
Answer   : Because the topic was interesting and never done in Malaysia. So I want to determine the impact of skill variety on employee effectiveness and organizational performance, by distributed questionnaires to employees in Malaysia SMEs (in manufacturing, service and agriculture sectors).


Question : What kind of software that you used to analyse your data?
Answer   : I used SPSS software and found that there are 3 hypothesis (skill variety, task significance and mentoring moderates) which have positive relationship on employee effectiveness.

2) For Topic : The impact of service quality - A study on Hotel industry in Malaysia

Researcher by :
Chin Chee Hua


Question : Why you use Smart PLS software in your research?
Answer   : Because Smart PLS is a new software to analyse the data and it is more easy to calculate the data. Additional, it was suggested from my supervisor, Associate Professor Dr. Lo May Chiun.

CHANGE MY TOPIC:


I would like to change my topic because I think it is not interesting. My new topic is to examine the factors influencing consumer decisions to choose petrol of Petronas or Shell in Kuching. I am so excited to do this research because I think it will be useful in the future research. This research will help to develop a good improvement strategies for these companies.      =))

Differences between fact and theory :

 What is Theory??

• Theory is an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances (Sutherland, 1976: 9).
• A theory on the other hand is offering an explanation to what has been observed or varified.

What is Fact??

• A fact is any phenomenon or action that is verified.
• It will remain as true even after several centuries unless there is a more rigid and precise way of measuring a certain phenomenon.

The difference between fact and theory

Inductive Research Approach:

• My research is related to Inductive Research which is "bottom - up" approach.
• May involves a degree of uncertainty.
• Inductive Research moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories.
• Known as flexible approach because there is no requirement of pre-determined theory to collect data and information. Observe the data and facts to reach at tentative hypothesis and define a theory as a research problem.
• Inductive approach allows the researcher to provide subjective reasoning with the help of various real life   example (Ridenour, Benz and Newman 2008).

Narrow down the research:


I make my research to be specific which is the respondent of Unimas's students. The respondent is about 100 students.

Why I choose this topic??

I choose this topic to find the goodness of online shopping in the perception of Unimas's students. Many of them think that online shopping do not give satisfaction to the buyers. They might prefer to go buy the products or services at the shop rather than online.




Basic Research:


My research is related to the basic research. The research is focuses on fundamental principles and testing theories. This is to expand the human's knowledge, such as how and why a specific reaction occurs. 


Basic research aims to explain, predict and describe fundamental bases of behavior. It has a broad objective of generating knowledge, understanding of phenomena and problems that occur in various organizational settings.