Team Week Three Reflection Essay Example for Free

Team Week Three Reflection Essay This week Learning Team was tasked with understanding three objectives. Those objectives were as follows: 2.1 State the purpose of the business research. 2.1 Develop appropriate research questions and hypotheses. 2.3 Identify dependent and independent variables in business research. Our learning team discovered that business research is designed to increase your understanding a given management dilemma by looking for ways others have addressed or solved problems similar to yours. Business research can be applied in any number of ways in a business setting, such as determining what kind of business strategy your competitors are using, and finding ways that other businesses have countered that strategy in the past. Business research can also be used to determine how to market a product coming to market by creating research panels to determine how potential customers will react to the product. We also learned that unless proper research questions are developed along with a meaningful hypotheses, any research conducted will be flawed or incomplete. For instance, without asking potential customers in focus groups what they don’t like about your new product or service you may launch the new product and see dismal sales as customers reject your product because of the faults you failed to find or correct. A corresponding hypothesis will help direct the research once the correct questions are asked, as well as leading to further questions to help complete your research. Questions and hypothesis are therefor intertwined, and can be considered together when creating a research plan. Finally, we discovered that independent variables are unchangeable, such as a research population’s social status. An independent variable is manipulated by the researcher, and the manipulation causes an effect on the dependent variable. There is usually more than one independent variable, and each of them are usually â€Å"correlated† to some extent.