Purchasing Agent Industry in China
Introduction
This chapter builds on the literature chapter will elucidate the research methodology used in the research process. The focus will be on explaining the research objectives and questions and presenting different research approaches and strategies. Research methodology includes research objectives, pilot-testing, data collection method followed, research tool used, problems faced, and any other limitations of the research undertaken.
Research Objectives and Questions
Research Objectives
Purchasing agent industry is an emerging industry in China and has experienced good growth rates in the past few years. The primary objective of the present research program is to study and analyze the emergence and growth of the industry and forecast the future growth and other prospects of the industry conducting a primary field based research.
Research Questions
Question 1: Why and when was the purchasing industry emerged in China?
The researcher aims to find out the reasons and the time of the emergence of the purchasing industry in China.
Question 2: Who are the customer groups for the purchasing agent industry?
Through this key research question, the researcher aims to not just reveal the main customer groups for the purchasing agent industry, but also change in the industry’s customer groups from the time the industry first emerged till now.
Question 3: What is the development process of the purchasing agent industry?
This research questions aims to track the development of the purchasing agent industry, including their operational details like means of payment, growth in the range of products.
Question 4: Will this market for purchasing agent industry grow to be large and stable in coming five years?
As this question aims to forecast the future of the purchasing agent industry, market dynamics like merchants’ condition and feedback from the customers of the industry will be collected and analyzed.
Question 5: What are the prospects for this industry?
The aim of this research question is to forecast whether the purchasing agent industry will survive and develop in the future. For this end, the researcher wants to collect opinions of both the merchants and customers.
Research Approach and Strategies
Research Approaches
A multipronged approach which included both induction and deduction research techniques were used for this dissertation. According to Creswell (2003), a wider theory or generalisation can be built only by properly studying the observations and patterns. Inductive research is used in this study in order to precisely answer the research question and gain a close understanding of the future growth prospects of the purchasing agents industry in China. Furthermore, a deduction approach was also used for research along with the induction approach. The four sequential stages for conducting research as listed by Robson (1993) are: forming hypotheses, expressing hypotheses, testing hypotheses and confirm hypotheses or suggesting any modifications to the hypotheses which were initially framed. In this dissertation, the researcher has developed hypotheses which state that the emerging purchasing agents industry in China will survive, grow well in future, and its developing market will become more and more stable. A primary research was required to be completed in order to complete the three other stages of the research process as suggested by Robson (1993).
Research Strategies
Two main research strategies have been used in this research program. Basing on the requirements of the research, both quantitative and qualitative primary data were collected. Quantitative data was collected through survey based questionnaires and qualitative data was collected through interviews. The qualitative data is complex and dense when compared with the objectivity and brevity of the quantitative data (Quinlan, 2011). By using both quantitative and qualitative data, a comprehensive result could be achieved by the researcher. Moreover, basing on the analysis of questionnaire and interview data, the researcher will be able to compare the opinions and attitudes expressed by different sources, such as the opinions given by both merchants and customers about the industry.
Design of Research Tools
Designing the questionnaire
For getting high-quality responses, the researcher needs to prepare an appropriate questionnaire which has a logical structure and precise set questions which can collect the exact information that is needed (Quinlan, 2011). Bothe open-ended and close-ended questions have been used in the questionnaire. Usage of close-ended questions helps in collecting more information in areas where the respondent can’t exactly give a figure (a number or grade) of his opinion or satisfaction levels. There were fourteen questions in total and they divided between the customers and merchants. Seven close-ended questions were required to be answered by both by the consumers and merchants, and three more close-ended questions will be answered by each of them separately. One open-ended question was placed at the end of the questionnaire in order to gain comprehensive information from both the set of respondents.
Designing the interview
In order to be more objective on the results and to measure the condition of merchants in the purchasing agents industry, a semi-structured interview with five basic questions was also designed. With the derivational question during the interview, the researcher was able to gain complex and in-depth insights.
Population and Sampling
In this research program, the target population were the customers and merchants of the purchasing agents industry in a particular market (China) including students, employees and others. Snowball sampling was used to select the respondents for collecting data. Babbie (2013, P. 200) points out that “Snowball sampling is appropriate when the members of a special population are difficult to locate.” Snow-ball sampling is a non-probability sampling technique where the initial respondents to a study will recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances. Snowball sampling in this research program was carried out by sending the questionnaire to the researcher’s friends and families via the social networks such as Facebook and Wechat. Online collection of data through links from social networks is now emerging as a preferred way of collecting data for research purposes (Kim, Morris, and Swait 2008). Respondents were also asked to forward the questionnaires to their friends and family members. Besides due to the geographical distance between the interviewer and the respondents, some online interviews were also conducted through the Facetime application.
Piloting Research Tools
The questionnaire needed to have a logical structure and easy for the respondents to understand in order to gain some useful data required for the research program. Before sending out the questionnaires to the target population, a pilot-test was conducted by collecting data from two Chinese students in Uclan University, one student in Sheznhen University and two employees in a company where one of the family members of the researcher worked. Many past researchers have extensively relied on student samples with outstanding results (Ostrom and Iacobucci 1995). According to Sekaran (1983), nationally valid samples can be drawn even by focusing on universities composing of students with diverse backgrounds. Basing on the feedback received from the pilot-test, few changes was made to be questionnaire. Chanages made to the questionnaire include the question about Career which was changed from an open-ended question to a closed-ended question as it is much easy to collect data. Another question related to the income of the respondents, “ What is your salary” was changed to “What is your monthly income”, as it was understood in the pilot test that the earlier question might be considered to be impolite.
Data Collection
As mentioned earlier, the questionnaire was sent to the respondents through social networking sites such as Facebook and Wechat. The researcher collected back the questionnaires after two weeks and a total of 200 filled up questionnaires were received from the respondents. Data collected through the questionnaires was coded and analyzed. The researcher used Microsoft Excel to present the data in the form of bar charts and pie charts. Complicated statistical analysis tools will not be needed to analyze the data as the amount of quantitative data collected is limited. Further, qualitative data collected for the study will be analyzed by careful understanding of respondents’ answers.
Problems and Limitations
Although there were few amendments to the questionnaire after the pilot-test, the questionnaire got a general positive feedback when it was filled up by the respondents. But a minor problem happened during the data collection stage. As the questionnaires were sent through a free survey website, the link to the questionnaire didn’t work for some time and the researchers had to resend the questionnaire to the respondents again. This created some problems to snowball sampling as the respondents couldn’t forward the questionnaire to their friends and family members easily. Furthermore, the target people of this research program are Chinese customers and merchants of the purchasing agents industry. As China is a big country with 100 billion plus population, the sample selected for this research was limited and might not be able to represent the population effectively. The end result of this could be that the results obtained from the study could not be generalized to the whole population under consideration without followup studies involving bigger sample sizes.
Both the quantitative method and qualitative method will be used for this research program during the data analysis process. After describing and summarizing the data, the findings of the data analysis will be presented and discussed in the following chapter.
Conclusion
The chapter focuses on the research objectives and methodology to be followed for achieving the dissertation objectives. The objectives of the research focus on exploring the origins and emergence of the purchasing industry in China, the current status of the industry, and its future prospects. By following a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research process, this research aims to arrive at a comprehensive answers to the research questions. Snowball sampling to be used for collecting data will make it easy to collect the required data by collecting information from people who are more aware of the industry. The limited sample size and the geographic concentration of respondents are some of the issues which should be overcome in future follow up studies.
This is sample paper written by one of our writers. Academic Mentor Online offers the best academic writing services in the market. We offer homework help for students all over the world. Contact us for high quality customer written papers.
References
- Kim, JY, Morris, JD, & Swait, J 2008, ‘Antecedents of true brand loyalty’, Journal of Advertising, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 99-117.
- Ostrom, A & Iacobucci, D 1995, ‘Consumer trade-offs and the evaluation of services’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 17-28.
- Sekaran, U 1983, ‘Methodological and theoretical issues and advancements in cross-cultural research’, Journal of International Business Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 61-73.