GB815 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection Example

The Person Who Could End the Project: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Research Access

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB815: Applied Research Topics

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The classmates, their projects and Harrowgate Community Bank are composite; the sources cited are real.

My Answer and Why I Gave It

The instructor opened the session by asking each of us to name the single person who could stop our study. I answered first and said, "Nobody. My data are public. The SBA posts its loan records for anyone to download, and state business records are open to search. I don't need anyone's permission." I believed it. Unlike classmates studying their own employers, I had chosen a direction that seemed immune to gatekeepers, and I was a little proud of that.

Two Projects That Had Already Stopped

The next twenty minutes were about projects that had stopped. A classmate described a study of franchisee satisfaction that ended when the franchisor's legal department, which had first welcomed it, withdrew permission to contact franchisees after reading the draft survey. Another described a study of a hospital system's supply chain that stalled when the sponsoring executive left. I described my own earlier idea, a study of franchise unit closures from disclosure documents, which I had set aside in Unit 2 because the documents would take months to code by hand. That was a feasibility problem, not an access problem, and I said so.

The Question That Undid My Answer

Then came a question that had never crossed my mind: "Who is going to explain your data to you?" She had read my Unit 5 audit and noticed that I planned to interview loan officers to understand how the franchise code is entered, since my trial had found misclassified loans. Those interviews depended on introductions from the director of the state SBA lenders' association, whom I knew only slightly. If he declined, I would have no way to learn how other banks used the code, and my correction for misclassification would rest on guesses.

She was right, and it was worse than she suggested. My study's credibility depended on showing that the franchise code meant the same thing across lenders. Without the interviews, a committee could fairly ask whether my comparison of franchise and independent loans was really a comparison of lenders' reporting habits.

My data needed no one's permission, but my interpretation of the data did, and the association director held that key.

What Changed and What Did Not

What changed was my sense of where the risk lay. I had thought of access as permission to obtain data, and by that definition I was safe. The seminar showed me that access also includes the knowledge needed to use data correctly, and that this kind of access often sits with people who have no obligation to help. Feldman et al. (2003) describe access as something negotiated with people at every stage rather than granted once, and I had treated my project as if it had no stages after the download.

What did not change was my judgment that public data were the right foundation. The SBA records are still free, complete for my purposes and beyond anyone's power to withdraw. Glennon and Nigro (2005) built a careful analysis of default on similar records without interviewing lenders, which shows the data can stand on their own when the analysis is designed for that, and Bates (1995) drew his comparison of franchise and independent survival from Census records in the same way.

The Fallback

The next day I wrote a fallback version of the design that needs no interviews. Instead of interpreting the franchise code through lenders' accounts, it validates the code directly: every new-business loan coded independent will be checked against a list of franchise system names drawn from state disclosure documents, and the comparison of franchise and independent loans will be run twice, once with the code as reported and once with corrected classifications. If the two results agree, the code's imperfections do not drive the finding. Interviews, if the association director agrees to make introductions, will enrich the interpretation but will no longer carry any part of the core analysis. I emailed the director the same afternoon, and I no longer need his answer to proceed.

Looking back, I think my first answer reflected a kind of pride in having found a clean design. The classmates whose projects had stopped were not careless; they had depended on people, and people change their minds. I had depended on people too, without noticing, because the dependency sat in a later step of the study than the one I had examined. The instructor's question was useful precisely because it asked about any person, at any stage, rather than about permission to begin.

References

Bates, T. (1995). A comparison of franchise and independent small business survival rates. Small Business Economics, 7(5), 377-388. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01302738

Feldman, M. S., Bell, J., & Berger, M. T. (2003). Gaining access: A practical and theoretical guide for qualitative researchers. AltaMira Press.

Glennon, D., & Nigro, P. (2005). Measuring the default risk of small business loans: A survival analysis approach. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 37(5), 923-947. https://doi.org/10.1353/mcb.2005.0051