Branding

Branding and Education Sector

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The main focus of this thesis is to examine the importance of branding within the education sector. This chapter presents the brief description of the research methodology which is selected to accomplish the proposed research aim. This chapter has been divided into three main sections. In this chapter, the first section presents a brief description about the selected research design. In the second section, the selected research approach, data collection methods, research instruments and data analysis techniques have been elaborated. In the final section of this chapter the reliability/dependability, validity and ethical considerations are discussed.

Research Methods

For the reader to fully understand the research process, the researcher made further effort to use structure of a research onion as proposed by Saunders et al (2003) to explain the methods adopted in this study. The research onion also expedites the process of realizing the most suitable research approach/strategy. Thus it helps the researcher to determine appropriate philosophical orientations thus making clearer the best strategy to be adopted in the research exercise. Finally, the research onion also offers certain clarity as to time at the disposal of the researcher. The diagram below shows a better picture of what has been explained;

Research Design

To conduct a research study, the plan to carry out a research work is extremely important as the research plan specify the path to conduct the research study. Quantitative research is one in which data is quantifiable and analyzed using statistics. Qualitative research approach is done where the variables cannot be quantified. Qualitative researches are narrative records of the phenomena being studied by techniques such as participant observation and unstructured interviews. The fundamental difference between both methods is that quantitative studies the association or relationship between quantified variables and qualitative variables makes structural and situational contexts. Qualitative research seeks to identify the underlying nature of reality, its system of relationships, dynamic structure. Quantitative research seeks to determine the strength of association or correlation between variables, generalization and objectivity of the results through a sample to make inference about a population.

The fundamentals of quantitative methodology can be found in positivism that arises in the early nineteenth century as a reaction to the empiricism that was dedicated to collect data without introducing knowledge beyond the field of observation. In the early twentieth century, the neo-positivism or logical positivism was one of the most important contributions to probabilistic induction. The key consists of logical positivism and hypotheses probabilistically if accepted and proven in different circumstances from them develop general theories. The statistics available test these hypotheses and determine their acceptance or rejection. Thus the scientific process, after an observation generates a hypothesis and then give conclusion based on the experiment process. If the hypothesis is universally accepted, it becomes law otherwise becomes theory. In general, quantitative methods are beneficial because they have high external validity but it is difficult to generalize the qualitative research. The use of both quantitative and qualitative procedures in a research could probably help correct the ...