DBA Program

This course is aimed to learn about the opportunities and challenges of qualitative research in business management. It includes topics on observational field research, case histories, narratives, and case studies, interviewing, principles of action research, evaluation and ground theory. The course makes students aware of how the choice of different methodologies is closely linked to broader theoretical and conceptual issues, philosophical commitments and behavioral assumptions in qualitative social science research.

This course aims to engage students in the process of making strategic and appropriate research design choices from a variety of qualitative research methods appropriate for social science research. The course will help students to gain knowledge about a range of core qualitative data collection techniques and understand the sampling and recruitment strategies that frame data collection. Doctoral students will also learn qualitative data analysis techniques to adopt in relation to a research objectives and questions. Essential data collection techniques, such as semi-structured interviewing as well as focus group composition, will be complemented with knowledge about conducting content analysis, thematic analysis, and data coding and analysis techniques.

This course is aimed so that students learn the process of research in management and business of a doctoral study and prepares the students for independent research work. It focuses on the common challenges of designing a research project at doctoral level. As a solid foundation for conducting research, doctoral students will learn a structured approach to the research process, which includes defining the research topic and the research questions in the context of the existing research literature and/or business practice as well as building of a conceptual model and hypotheses development. The course helps students to conduct a systematic literature review and develop critical and constructive reviews of exemplary published research and the ethical dimensions of research.

The course examines in-depth the process of selecting and developing an appropriate and refined research strategy, and clarifying the stages of a research project. The course seeks to involve students in developing their skills and understanding of research design and stages, research methodology selection, data collection and presentation, as well as proposal, thesis and article writing, all of which aim at improving doctoral student’s management research outputs.

This course aims to provide basic quantitative methods for management research. The focus is on utilizing simple methods appropriately. Major topics covered include finding data, summarizing data, hypothesis testing, and difference-in-difference analysis. The course also aims to help students appreciate the role of theory in quantitative research and develop basic capabilities to design tests to examine competing theories.

This course aims to introduce doctoral students to quantitative methods (large-N) as they apply to social science research. It provides students with expertise about statistical techniques and skills for analyzing quantitative data that may be required for their research. The emphasis is on the appropriate choice and application of estimation techniques and tests of primary and secondary data in order to discover and prove relationships and associations among variables. This course will also discuss causal inference in relation to these techniques and analyse some of the assumptions on which large-N quantitative research techniques such as regression are based on.