ASSESSED COURSEWORK TWO

Assessed Coursework Two

Assessed Coursework Two

Introduction

This assignment aims to highlight the three main approaches of positivism, interpretive and critical theory in contrast to the main research questions of the previously completed assignment one. The previous assignment discussed the efficacy of business strategies pertinent to Small and Medium level business Enterprises (SME's). This assignment would justify the relevant philosophical approach and method chosen out of these three approaches to best address the research question of the previous assignment. The main research question of the previous assignment aims to examine the application of a suitable and relevant business strategy for SME's in order to increase their market prominence, giving them the competitive edge to compete with other firms operating locally and internationally.

Hence, the main discussion of this paper would revolve around in critically reviewing the three philosophical approaches and their applicability to best address the main research questions, as well as which data and research tools would be appropriate to employ and use, for this research to gain effective results.

Discussion

To address any research question, the researcher has to make a choice between choosing the correct and the most suitable methodology for efficient research. This is concerned with the choosing of either quantitative or qualitative research methods. Where in essence, the researcher chooses either quantitative approach, which deals with numbers or large sampling population, or qualitative method where the researcher uses different words and meanings using smaller samples to build theories (Rowlands, 2005).

A researcher can also choose to work with only one methodology, while they are also at liberty to choose a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Despite using either an individual or a combination of methodology, it is likely that these two methods will produce contradictory results and findings of the same phenomena. Nonetheless, according to Ryan (2006) using both quantitative and qualitative methods would help the researcher in obtaining the answers to their questions in the best possible way, which they wouldn't have been able to achieve if they had chosen to use a single methodology in the first place.

Furthermore, methodology is only one the three main aspects of the research paradigm the researchers work with, explicitly or implicitly, where this paradigm is the overall conceptual framework that a researcher may choose to work with and which acts as the main investigative guide force for them. There are four main different paradigms of science, namely; positivism, constructivism, critical theory and realism. However, the main underlying concept behind these four main paradigms is the question that states how best to generalize the findings of one research project to other situations (Trochim, 2006).

On the contrary, Crossan (n.d) states three reasons for the importance of philosophy to a research methodology, by firstly stating that it can help the researcher to refine and specify the appropriate research methods for their study, meantime also organizing the overall research strategy that they will use which would help them better understand what type of evidence is gathered, its interpretation and how its findings help to ...