A note on research method quality criteria for MBA dissertation projects

A note on research method quality criteria for MBA dissertation projects

 

Briefly describe 3 major quantitative research method quality criteria (e.g. internal and external validities) and 3 major qualitative research method quality criteria (e.g. credibility, confirmability) in the context of doing MBA dissertation projects.

In MBA dissertation projects, the three most common quantitative quality criteria are internal validity, external validity, and reliability; the three most common qualitative criteria are credibility, transferability, and confirmability. These map roughly to whether your findings are true, generalizable, consistent, and unbiased in the way appropriate to each method.

Quantitative criteria

·        Internal validity: whether the study’s results really come from the variables you are testing, rather than from confounding factors or design flaws.

·        External validity: whether the findings can be generalized beyond your sample to a wider population or other settings.

·        Reliability: whether the same study would produce similar results if repeated, using the same measures or procedures.

Qualitative criteria

·        Credibility: whether the findings are believable and accurately reflect participants’ experiences or views.

·        Transferability: whether the findings may be useful in other contexts, based on enough detail for readers to judge fit.

·        Confirmability: whether the findings are grounded in the data rather than the researcher’s personal bias.

MBA dissertation use

For an MBA dissertation, quantitative work usually strengthens these criteria through careful sampling, standardized instruments, and controls, while qualitative work strengthens them through triangulation, member checking, thick description, reflexivity, and audit trails. In practice, examiners want to see that your chosen method is rigorous in its own terms, not judged by the standards of the other method.

 

How does the choice of research philosophy to use affect the relative importance placed on these qualitative and quantitative research method quality criteria, with reference to an MBA dissertation project theme of "an evaluation of the organizational resilience of the Hong Kong Hotel, using semi-structured interview, questionnaire survey and descriptive statistics study on some relevant government and industry statistics via Internet search?

The choice of research philosophy changes which quality criteria matter most, because each philosophy defines what counts as “good” knowledge in the first place. For your Hong Kong hotel resilience dissertation, a pragmatist stance usually fits best because you are combining interviews, a questionnaire, and secondary statistics to answer a practical managerial question.

Philosophy effect

·        Positivism places the greatest weight on quantitative criteria such as internal validity, external validity, and reliability, because the aim is to measure patterns objectively and draw defensible generalizations from the survey and secondary statistics.

·        Interpretivism places the greatest weight on qualitative criteria such as credibility, transferability, and confirmability, because the aim is to understand how hotel managers and staff make sense of resilience in context.

·        Pragmatism gives balanced importance to both sets of criteria, but it judges them by usefulness for the dissertation’s practical purpose rather than by philosophical purity.

Your hotel topic

For an evaluation of organizational resilience in a Hong Kong hotel, the interviews would mainly need credibility and confirmability, because the key issue is whether the accounts of managers and employees are trustworthy and not overly shaped by your own assumptions. The questionnaire survey and descriptive statistics would mainly need reliability, internal validity, and some external validity, because you want the numerical results to be consistent and reasonably defensible for the hotel context. Since you are also using government and industry statistics from the internet, the quality concern is less “qualitative trustworthiness” and more whether the secondary data are accurate, comparable, and relevant to the time period and hotel segment being studied.

Relative weighting

Under a pragmatic mixed-method design, you would not treat all six criteria equally in every part of the dissertation. Instead, you would emphasize qualitative rigor when reporting interview themes, and quantitative rigor when reporting survey results and trend statistics. In the methodology chapter, this usually means showing how each method is made credible on its own terms, and then explaining how the methods complement each other to build a fuller picture of hotel resilience.

Dissertation wording

A suitable way to frame it in your MBA dissertation is: “This study adopts a pragmatic research philosophy to integrate qualitative and quantitative evidence. The interview component is assessed primarily through credibility, transferability, and confirmability, while the survey and secondary statistics are assessed primarily through reliability, internal validity, and external validity”. That wording signals to examiners that you understand why mixed methods require different quality standards for different data sources.

A collection of blog notes on using chatgpt for research purpose.