7.2 The Research Process

Any good search for information begins with a well defined research process that includes several steps regardless of whether or not you include AI-assisted technologies in the process. Having a clear view of the process as a whole, as depicted in Figure 7.2.1, will help you to efficiently manage your time, resources, and efforts.

Defining the Problem and Identifying Your Goal

Research is performed typically in pursuit of information that helps to solve a problem, confirm a hypothesis, reveal new information, and the like. That research will only be effective if the challenge or problem is defined to identify the goals for the research and limit the scope of the work to be done. To define the scope, carefully analyze all aspects of the situation at hand in order to identify avenues of investigation: the origin of the problem, how it has evolved, its impact, costs, and any challenges in finding some solutions.  Asking the following questions can help you with this scoping task:

• How do you know there is a problem?
• What measurable impacts can you point to?
• What will you need to prove that this is a significant problem?
• Do you have data to show the extent of the “unsatisfactory situation” and how it negatively affects people, the organization, stakeholders, or others?
• What is the expected goal or target that any proposed solution is expected to meet?
• What criteria need to be met in order to have a satisfactory solution?
• Is there a budget limit?
• Is there an expert or someone experienced who can provide insights on the problem?

Figure 7.2.2 provides an overview of five reasons improper scoping happens.

LLMs may be helpful in this analysis phase, but only if specific details about the problem are included in the prompt. Company confidentiality may not permit you to input such detail into an LLM or other AI application. Rather, consider investigating the problem yourself to acquire an in depth knowledge of the situation while respecting confidentiality.

Conducting Preliminary Research

Before launching into detailed research, it’s best to conduct some preliminary research into the work that has already been done by others on the problem. Doing so enables you to get a sense of the major issues surrounding the topic, investigate the best sources for information and data, and determine which experts and reliable sources you would want to consult further. Starting with the most proximal and immediate sources of information within your organization is advisable. Then you can expand your research as the subject matter dictates.

Various AI-assisted research tools exist to help you conduct preliminary research into the topic. Ensure that you choose reliable tools. LLMs are not as yet reliable because they generate hallucinated, incorrect, or fake information. Be selective in choosing search tools: library search tools and databases such as those found on the Seneca Libraries site are the most reliable and include peer-reviewed texts. Using such tools allows you, the researcher, to explore the topic as you review various materials that come up in your search.

AI research tools can rapidly conduct the research for you. While you will definitely experience a savings in time and effort, you will not develop as integrated a knowledge on the subject as when you are performing the searches yourself. And some tools, such as Perplexity, have proven to be unreliable, so choose your AI search tools after researching them to find out which are the best for the subject matter at hand.

Articulating the Research Question

Articulating a research question helps you to narrow the focus of your research. Research has a tendency to go in all kinds of directions; your research question will anchor your activity. To articulate an effective research question, consider the problem or challenge at hand, the primary potential course of action to solve the issue, and the key research done so far on the subject. You may want use various methods to narrow the focus of your research. Strategies for narrowing and focusing include the following:

• Free–writing: Write for 10 minutes straight without stopping or self-editing.
• Mind-mapping or Concept-mapping: Create a graphic organizer listing ideas and indicating how they are connected. See the section below for more information on concept-mapping in narrowing the focus of research.
• Questioning:  What do I already know? What do I need to find out? Use the who, what, where, when, why, how questions to brainstorm.
• Brainstorming: List all ideas without censoring or rejecting any, no matter how seemingly insignificant they might appear at first.

You can use LLMs to help you articulate a research question, but your prompt will have to be specific. Again, ensure that in your prompt you do not share confidential company information.

Designing Your Research

Once you have a good understanding of the problem and have some knowledge of the major work already done on the subject, you can now design your research. This process often entails reflecting on your goals, research direction, materials and resources, expertise, budget, and gaps in knowledge. At this stage, creating a project plan for your work would help you delineate and clarify key aspects of the research activity:

• Goal(s) and objectives
• Constraints
• Anticipated impediments
• Expertise at hand and to be resourced
• Budget
• Task breakdown
• Timeline for tasks and project completion
• Documentation methods, tracking, and storage plans
• Legal, regulatory, and policy considerations and guidelines
• Geographical, demographic, and technological considerations

At this stage, you should be making decisions on the types of materials and resources you will be using, including the moments when you will integrate the use of LLMs and other AI-assisted search technologies. Determining which types of technologies will be included and excluded in the research process should be a deliberate part of the design process and influenced by ethical research practices, organizational policies, and confidentiality.

LLMs can be helpful in drafting a research plan. By providing a detailed description of your goals, plans, constraints, etc. in the prompt, the LLM will provide you with a basic planning document that you can refine to suit your specific purpose.

Gathering Information and Data

Anyone with a sense of curiosity and a thirst for knowledge will know that research can quickly expand as you investigate one excellent resource after another. Here are a few strategies to help you gather information and data while being mindful of your goal:

• Select search tools that are known to have a minimum degree of bias and inaccuracy. If you are unsure, do a brief test with the tool you are using to ensure fair collection of information.
• Organize your search by creating a list of key topic areas and link each with the methods that are most appropriate for data collection.
• Determine whether you need qualitative and/or quantitative information: Doing so will help you plan your methods. For example, to obtain qualitative information, you would most likely be using surveys, observation, and interviews.
• Be discriminating: Select quality materials that will help to create a balanced discussion of the subject. Investigating information that challenges your perspective and assumptions in addition to materials that support them will enable you to create a strong argument.
• Employ a range of materials to solidify your credibility.
• Discard sources that obviously are biased, inaccurate, and based on flimsy data.
• Keep a journal that records your daily activity and reflections on the direction of the research so you can keep track of your progress.

Information on using various traditional and non-traditional sources of information can be found in the chapter Finding and Evaluating Research Information.

Summarizing and Documenting Your Sources

As you are performing your research, record your sources and summarize key articles. Doing so throughout the research process will help you to save time, gain depth knowledge of the subject matter, and envision the arguments you will use in your reporting. The manner in which you conduct your search will influence just how deeply you will become familiar with the subject matter. If you search and summarize the key articles yourself, you will have much greater knowledge than if you use AI applications.

AI search tools like Elicit are convenient, however. They will use a research question to quickly complete searches for papers published through Semantic Scholar. This tool will aggregate sources, summarize articles, and pull key information from them. In addition, tools like Zotero can be used to organize and share information gathered through the internet. It’s automation features will also create annotations, as well as in text citations and bibliographies inside Word and Google documents. Whatever tools you use to gather and document the information, remember that you will be responsible for the information you include in your reporting, so you must ensure that the summarized information is accurate and unbiased.

Tracking from the outset the progress of your research is an important time saver. With a record of your work, you can see the information you have already viewed and can avoid the duplication of your efforts. In addition, the record of information allows you to efficiently cite and document your work as you draft your report at the end of the process. If working with others, they will be able to see the work that has been done, thus avoiding duplication by team members.

Analyzing and Interpreting the Information

Effective research will give you a considerable amount of useable information. Now what do you do with it? Once you have gathered your research, organize it into topic areas if you have not already done so in the gathering phase. Sort and select the information that you will be including in your discussion of your findings. At this point, you may want to use the following strategies to organize the materials:

• Categorize and classify: Creating categories and classifying key information will help you to organize complex data into meaningful groups. Doing so will also reveal patterns and enable clearer comparisons. For example, you could classify an organization’s sustainability initiatives as strong, significant, moderate, minimal, or absent.
• Compare and contrast: Comparing and contrasting can improve the understanding of the situation at hand versus what it could or should be. Using a methodical approach that includes parallel criteria for the analysis will give this strategy more validity. For example, you could compare data relating to website traffic and usage in the past year to those gathered over the past three to reveal important trends in usage.
• Describe: Describing a situation or object helps you to clarify and define it. Using specific detail, here, is essential. Draw on physical and other detail, chronologies, locations, and other type of specifics to facilitate understanding by your audience. For example, describing how a marketing initiative did not meet expectations allows the audience to understand the initial problem that is triggering the investigation.
• Analyze and Evaluate: Using your critical thinking abilities to analyze and evaluate the information gathered will add depth and meaning to the discussion of your findings. Business analysis and evaluations can take many forms and specific techniques can be employed to facilitate the process: Take a look at this site for information on 10 Essential Business Analysis Techniques.
• Predict:  Recognizing patterns in the information and data you have gathered and analyzed along with making inferences will enable you to make educated predictions on the direction or trend in which a problem will evolve as well as how a potential solution will work out. For example, Uber uses data on probable increases in ridership depending on current contexts or situations to determine the prices of fares.

Developing Your Document

You are now ready to begin working on developing your reporting instrument, be it an infographic, presentation, or other type of report—informal or formal. To begin the process ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is your primary audience? Who else might have an interest in this research?
• What is the specific outcome you want this document or project to achieve? What do you want your readers to do, think, or decide after becoming aware of your findings?
• Who are the people who will be affected by this project? Who are the stakeholders?
• What is the best format to use to present these findings to these readers? (What format or specific information have they requested?)

You will find detailed information on how to develop business reports and presentations in the coming chapters of this text.

Using Concept Mapping to Narrow Your Research

In business, projects often focus on opportunities—whether a challenge is evident or an offer has been made. Clearly defining the need in as open-ended a way as is feasible, determining the desired outcome or goal, and coming up with ideas for an approach that will enable you to reach that goal are some determining factors for the direction that your research will take.

Your research process should be focused on providing support for the basic premise of your research question (is this idea feasible?) and prove your hypothesis or possible solution (will it be effective/beneficial?). You might do this by showing that similar ideas have been implemented and/or researched in other areas, or that the ideas you are presenting are based on sound evidence. Collecting your own primary data (such as a questionnaire or site visit) may also help show how your ideas are feasible.

The first step in most projects is figuring out what you already know and what you don’t know. This will help to direct the thrust of your research efforts. Without this basic contextual work, it’s difficult to work your way to finding relevant sources that can help you apply theories, analyze information and data from sources, and synthesize them into your own argument or recommendations. Concept mapping is one useful way to develop a direction for your work. Figure 7.2.3 depicts how concept mapping fits into project development within business contexts.

As depicted, concept mapping fits within the larger business development efforts and works in concert with business analysis, concepts, and practices; business understanding, and design thinking.

Figure 7.2.4 shows an approach to concept mapping that focuses on a specific problem. The mapping effort is focused on the general idea and finding areas of potential investigation.  A good focus for a paper or project will likely be 3-4 nodes away from the central problem box.

You generally cannot cover all issues in one paper or project. So your task is to narrow your focus so that you can research a specific aspect of the topic in-depth. Choose one specific focus (proposing a solution), and consider what other aspects must be included (defining the problem; choosing a specific demographic or geographical area to focus on; using criteria to narrow potential solutions).

As an example, consider the issue of Climate Change and how it might fit into each of these “narrowing your focus” categories. A problem-solving approach offers many ways to narrow your focus. Try creating a concept map such as shown in Figure 7.2.5 to get a sense of the many ways you might approach your topic, and then narrow down your focus to one of those approaches. This will help you think of keywords to use in your search for sources. The more you brainstorm, the more potential keywords and synonyms you can come up with. The “mind map” below shows various ways to consider the larger context of your problem and find a specific area to focus on.

This kind of “graphic brainstorming” can help you visualize the connections between the various ways your topic can be approached. You can ask questions such as how? why? who? to further extend this exploration. Your goal here is to narrow your focus to one “bubble” (that is perhaps 3 or 4 nodes away from your central topic node) that can afford a promising topic while limiting the scope to something you can accomplish in the given time frame and assignment specifications (word count, research requirement, goal, resources, budget, etc.). For brief instructions on how to use a concept map, view the following video found through The Learning Portal: How to use concept mapping  (2016).

LLMs can become efficient partners in helping researchers to brainstorm ideas and narrow the focus of investigations. See the example below:

Clearly, no one can solve the problem of climate change in one paper or project: No reasonable instructor or employer would expect anyone to do so. However, you might be asked to explore effective ways to analyze the costs of carbon emissions in a specific industry in a given period of time and/or geographical region. Or you might investigate whether a particular form of alternative energy would be effective in a particular situation. Even then, you would have to consider various tactics: Would you recommend changing a policy or law to try to address the causes of the problem? Providing incentives to industry or consumers? Evaluating a currently proposed solution?

Researching what other people working in this field have studied and written about can help you refine your focus and choose how you want to participate in this “conversation.” The ultimate aim is to narrow your topic enough to provide a specific question to guide your research and identify keywords and terminology related to your topic. A good research question should be somewhat open-ended; that is, the answer should not be a simple “yes” or “no.” The focus of your research question should allow you to provide a comprehensive answer that takes context into careful consideration.

As you can see, research will be needed no matter what the focus or approach is adopted in working on this type of project.

Using an organized and deliberate approach to researching information will help you save time and reveal information that you can use to your purpose. Following the steps in the research process and using tools like concept-mapping will help to reveal avenues of pursuit and the methods by which to best follow them.

References

Founder’s Blog. (n.d.). Why improper scoping happens [Infographic]. MindBowser. https://www.mindbowser.com/how-to-define-the-project-scope-the-foolproof-way/

Frisendal, T. (2013). Image: Business concept mapping. Humanizing business analysis: Visualizing meaning through business concept maps. https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/ID/2593/Humanizing-Business-Analysis-Visualizing-Meaning-through-Business-Concept-Maps.aspx

Malau-Aduli, B. and Alele, F. (2023). 2.1 Research Process – An Introduction to Research Methods for Undergraduate Health Profession Students

The Learning Portal. (2016, September 1). How to use concept mapping [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/PwADmiHGWWI

University of Victoria Libraries. (n.d.). [Concept Map]. http://libguides.uvic.ca/c.php?g=256802&p=3906769

Westford Uni-Online. (2024). 10 Essential Business Analysis Techniques Every Professional Should Know – Westford Online