MS- 95 Research Methodology for Management Decisions

1. Discuss the various experimental designs as powerful tools to study the cause-and-effect relationships among variables in research.

2. A parliamentary study on the issue of self-rule for the District of Chandigarh involved surveying 2,000 people from the city’s population regarding their opinions on several issues related to self-rule. Chandigarh is a city in which many neighbourhoods are poor, and many neighbourhoods are rich, with very few neighbourhoods falling between the extremes. The researchers who were administering the survey had reasons to believe that the opinions expressed on the various questions would be highly dependent on income. Which method was more appropriate, stratified sampling or cluster sampling? Explain briefly.

3. Three samples of five, four and five moor car tyres are drawn respectively from three brands, A, B and C, manufactured by three machines. The lifetime of these tyres (in ‘000 miles) is given below. Test whether the average lifetime of the three brands of tyres is equal or not.

A B C

45 41 44

42 40 42

43 42 38

44 43 43

42 … 39

4. Describe the major events of your college life to a group of your friends. You make a 3 minutes presentation and ask for their reactions to the presentations and their suggestions for improvement on the focus of the presentation theme. List out the suggestions they make to you.

5. You may go through various issues of any management journal(s). You may likely come across a regression model for estimating, sales, advertisement expenditure, price or any other variable. Discuss how the model may be used for the following:

a. Explanation purposes.

b. Prediction of the future value of the dependent variable.

c. Helping the decision maker decides what to do to achieve a given object