IGNOU MS-95 - Research Methodology for Management Decisions

1. Distinguish between primary and secondary data. Explain any three methods of collecting primary data using examples wherever possible. 2. Take any managerial decision that was taken in your organization and of which you are aware of the information and the process through which it has gone through. Analyse the problem-solving steps that have gone through and the improvement that you would suggest if the same situation has to be faced all over again. 3. You have been assigned the task of measuring the job satisfaction of Blue-Collar Employees in your organization. Design a suitable questionnaire to measure the same. 4. Define a research report and explain its purpose. Describe briefly the various elements included in a research report. 5. The following data shows employee rates of defective work before and after a change in the wage incentive plan. Compare the following two sets of data to see whether the change lowered the defective units produced. Use the 0.10 level of significance. Before 8 7 6 9 7 10 8 6 5 8 10 8 After 6 5 8 6 9 8 10 7 5 6 9 8 (Given the tabulated value required for comparison is 0.3770)

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. 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