GB730 Unit 10 Methodology Chapter Draft Example

One Chapter Another Analyst Could Follow: A Unit 10 Methodology Chapter Draft for a Revenue Management Override Study

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB730: Applied Business Research Design and Methodology

Unit 10 Methodology Chapter Draft

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hotel company, its systems and its people are composite and illustrative, and no data have been collected; the methods sources cited are real.

Section 3: Research Method and Design

This section describes how the study will be conducted. It restates the purpose and research questions, explains the researcher's role, presents the method and design and the reasons for them, and then describes the population, ethical safeguards, instruments, data collection and organization, analysis, and the steps taken to support validity and trustworthiness.

Purpose Statement and Research Questions

The study follows an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. It first estimates how often and in which direction revenue managers depart from the rates their pricing system recommends, and how those departures relate to the share of rooms sold and the rate guests paid, across the 22 hotels one management company operates in two regions of the country. It then asks managers to explain those decisions, and uses their explanations to interpret the patterns.

Three questions guide the study. RQ1 asks how strongly overrides above and below the recommended rate relate to occupancy and to average daily rate once measured demand is held constant. RQ2 asks how revenue managers describe the information and reasoning behind decisions to override or accept recommendations. RQ3 asks in what ways those descriptions help explain the associations found in RQ1.

Role of the Researcher

The person conducting this study is a senior revenue analyst at the company where the study takes place and was a member of the team that configured the revenue management system's pricing rules when it was installed in 2022. This position brings close knowledge of the system, the data and the people, and it brings risks. Managers may shape what they say to an interviewer who helped build the tool they are describing, and the researcher may read the records with expectations formed by years of watching managers work. Brannick and Coghlan (2007) argue that insider research can be rigorous when the insider's position is examined rather than ignored, and this study examines it in three ways. Identifiers are removed before the researcher sees the data, invitations to interviews are sent by someone else, and a reflexive journal and peer debriefing, described below under trustworthiness, check the researcher's interpretations against the data.

Research Method

A mixed methods approach was selected because the problem joins a question of outcomes to a question of motives. Whether overrides are associated with occupancy and rate is a question about patterns across thousands of hotel-nights, which requires quantitative analysis. Why managers override is a question about reasoning, which requires managers' own accounts. Neither method alone would address the problem that leadership faces.

Research Design

Within mixed methods, an explanatory sequential design was chosen (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). The records are analyzed first, and their results govern the second phase: which managers are invited and which patterns the conversations explore. Three alternatives were considered. A quasi-experiment comparing hotels was not possible because every hotel received the system in the same month, with identical override rights. A qualitative case study could not address the association between overrides and outcomes. A survey would have asked managers to report behavior that the system already records more accurately. The chosen design does not establish causation. It estimates associations adjusted for the demand information in the records, and the qualitative phase helps interpret what those associations mean.

Population and Sampling

For the quantitative phase, the population is every hotel-night at the company's 22 managed hotels from January 2023 through December 2025, about 24,000 records. No sampling is needed because the full population is available, although nights excluded under the rules in the data organization subsection will be counted and reported. Hotels whose owners decline to allow their data to be used will be removed, and their number and type will be reported.

For the qualitative phase, the population is the roughly 30 people who held revenue manager roles during the study period and remain employed by the company. Participants will be selected purposefully from three groups defined by the quantitative results, about five from each, giving about fifteen interviews. If fewer agree, the study will proceed with those who do, and the shortfall will be reported.

Ethical Research

No data will be collected until the university's institutional review board has approved the study and the company has signed letters of cooperation from the senior vice president of revenue and the chief financial officer, along with a data use agreement reviewed by general counsel. These documents exist only as drafts. Hotel records will be coded by the company's information systems team before extraction, and the key linking codes to hotels and managers will be held by that team. Interview participants will receive an informed consent form stating that taking part is a free choice, that no one at the company will learn who said no, that they may withdraw at any time, and that nothing they say will be shared with their supervisors. Recordings and transcripts will be stored on an encrypted company drive and destroyed five years after the study is completed.

Instruments

Two instruments were developed. The extraction protocol defines eighteen variables drawn from the revenue management, property management, human resources and rate-shopping systems, each with its source field, definition, coding rule and known problems. A night counts as overridden when the rate on sale stayed more than two percent away from the system's figure for a full day or longer in the two months before arrival, a rule chosen to separate managers' decisions from rounding and brief corrections. The interview protocol contains nine questions developed using the framework of Kallio et al. (2016). Seven are fixed. Two will be written after the quantitative phase to probe the patterns it finds. Both instruments will be reviewed before use, the extraction protocol by the information systems director and a one-month test, and the interview protocol by two revenue managers at a different company.

Data Collection

Quantitative data will be extracted in a single pull one week after the test month is checked. Interviews will take place over video, last 45 to 60 minutes, and be scheduled at times participants choose. Each will be recorded with permission and transcribed. The researcher will write an analytic memo and a journal entry within a day of each interview.

Data Organization

Extracted data will be stored as a single coded dataset with a data dictionary. Duplicate hotel-night records will be resolved by keeping the later night audit. Closed nights, and nights on which renovation or damage took most rooms off the market, will be left out. Gaps in competitor rates will be filled by multiple imputation, and the main models will be rerun without the filled values to see whether anything changes. Interview recordings, transcripts, memos, codebook versions and the decision log will be stored in separate dated folders.

Data Analysis

For RQ1, occupancy and the logarithm of average daily rate will each be modeled with a linear mixed model including random intercepts for hotel and manager and fixed effects for override category, demand indicators, group rooms, day of week and month. Each estimate will be given with its 95 percent confidence interval, and an E-value will indicate how strong an unmeasured factor would need to be to account for each association (VanderWeele & Ding, 2017). For RQ2, transcripts will be analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019). For RQ3, a joint display will set each group's quantitative pattern beside its interview themes and record whether the accounts confirm, extend or contradict the pattern.

Every analytic choice in this subsection was fixed before extraction, and any change made later will be reported as a change.

Validity and Trustworthiness

For the quantitative phase, the main threat is selection: managers override when conditions differ, and some of those conditions are not recorded. Adjustment for the system's own forecast, bookings on hand, competitors' rates and events reduces this threat but cannot remove it, and the E-value reports how much remains. Measurement validity is supported by using system logs rather than self-reports. For the qualitative phase, trustworthiness follows the criteria set out by Lincoln and Guba (1985): credibility through triangulation against each manager's records, peer debriefing, negative case analysis and member checks using summaries; transferability through description of the setting; and dependability and confirmability through an audit trail reviewed by the dissertation chair.

Transition

This section has described how the study will be conducted. Section 4 will take the findings question by question, beginning with the quantitative results, followed by the themes from the interviews and the joint display that connects them.

References

Brannick, T., & Coghlan, D. (2007). In defense of being "native": The case for insider academic research. Organizational Research Methods, 10(1), 59-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428106289253

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2019). Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 11(4), 589-597. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2019.1628806

Creswell, J. W., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2018). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). SAGE.

Kallio, H., Pietila, A., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: Developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72(12), 2954-2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031

Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. SAGE.

VanderWeele, T. J., & Ding, P. (2017). Sensitivity analysis in observational research: Introducing the E-value. Annals of Internal Medicine, 167(4), 268-274. https://doi.org/10.7326/M16-2607