QUESTIONS
• Research consortium: the organisations that financed the research (banks) are both research subjects and are involved in the research design which could cause a conflict of interest. How could you deal with this ethical issue in this research situation?
• Sample size is n=15,000. Is this large sample really necessary? Discuss its relative and absolute size. What other options could have been taken?
• This is research in a real social context. Hence issues such as time, budget and politics are important. How would you deal with them? Discuss some of the decisions the researchers have made.
• The small banks were over-represented in the sample. Afterwards, a weight factor was calculated in order to correct for this. However, as could be expected, for some small banks the response rate was still too small to allow for organizational conclusions. So what was the point of this over-representation? Discuss its appropriateness in contemporary organizational research with many small firms. What alternatives could have been used to allow for conclusions at organizational level?
• Due to a strong campaign, some banks reached a response rate of over 60%, while others hardly reached 20%. To what extent did this bias the reliability of the results? What can be said about the generalization issue?