Research strategy of practice-oriented descriptive research

must be identified and described can be found. For instance, in order to find knowledge regarding “the kinds of things about which our workers complain” the researcher needs a to identify different situa- tions with different kinds of worker, b to identify and to describe dif- ferent types of complaint, and c to compare the findings from the different situations in order to develop a typology of complaints. Taking another example, in order to find knowledge regarding “the possible implementation strategies available for this type of design” the researcher needs a to identify different situations in which similar designs have been implemented, b to identify and to describe the dif- ferent types of implementation strategy, and c to compare the find- ings from the different situations in order to develop a typology of implementation strategies. The selected situations are cases, because they are instances from the domain of relevant situations such as the domain of situations in this practice in which complaints exist, or the domain of similar practices in which a similar design has been imple- mented that are selected for study. The analysis is comparative. There- fore, the usual research strategy in descriptive practice-oriented research can be characterized as a comparative case study. The outcome of the research contributes to the practitioner’s knowledge. An example of such a study will be discussed in Chapter 11 in 11.4 and 11.5.

10.4 Summary

This chapter can be summarized by the following list of possible types of practice-oriented research: ■ testing of a hypothesis that expresses a necessary or sufficient condition – hypothesis-testing by an experiment or a single case study; ■ testing of a hypothesis that expresses a deterministic relation – hypothesis-testing by an experiment or a comparative case study; ■ testing of a hypothesis that expresses a probabilistic relation – hypothesis-testing by an experiment, a survey or a compara- tive case study; ■ specifying a relation between two known variables – hypothesis- building by an experiment, or a comparative case study; ■ specifying a relation between a known independent or dependent variable and an as yet unknown dependent or independent variable – hypothesis-building by an experi- ment, or a comparative case study; ■ specifying a relation between as yet unknown independent and dependent variables – hypothesis-building by a compara- tive case study; ■ discovering and describing a relevant variable by a compara- tive case study. We will discuss in detail how to design and conduct practice-oriented case studies in Chapter 11. We refer to other textbooks that discuss experi- mental research and survey research for advice about how to design and conduct hypothesis-testing and hypothesis-building experiments and surveys. 228