Asking the Right Research Question

This post is the first of three by guest contributors Matthew Aplin-Houtz and Sarah Willey. They discuss their experiences with practical, applied research and offer recommendations.

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An essential first step for a researcher is to ask a good question. Ideally, this question will be interesting and lead to creation or advancement of theory, but will also be useful to people in the “real world.” Within disciplines related to business, it is ideal that research answer questions that allow people in the field to make changes that will further their success.

The absolute best way to know what questions to ask is to spend time in the field. Nothing beats lived experience when it comes to truly understanding a problem. In our case, there is plenty of experience to come by – we have nearly a lifetime of combined experience in industry that we bring to the process of asking questions. As students in an executive Doctor of Business Administration program, we were driven to academia by the questions we encountered in our daily work.

Matthew’s Story: How Management Challenges Led to Research on Working Mothers

Matthew Aplin-Houtz

For nearly a decade and a half, Matthew has managed a multidisciplinary medical clinic owned by his wife, a chiropractor and acupuncturist. His main responsibility for the business is managing staff while his wife manages the clinical aspects of patient care. Supportive workers in the medical field are predominantly female, and Matthew realized that most of his employees were working mothers, and that they faced substantial struggles outside of work that often caused not only performance issues, but kept some workers from being mission-focused while on the job. When the COVID-19 pandemic initially started, all of his employees voiced concerns around childcare responsibilities that would limit their availability for work. Considering that his physical medicine business was not only deemed essential but also required in person attendance to serve the patients, his frontline working mothers were faced with problems he was not equipped to manage through without further study.

At the 2021 Academy of Management conference, Matthew and his coauthors presented a study inspired by the problems he encountered at his own workplace with working mothers and their struggles to make sense of their expected roles as both an employee and mother. The qualitative study used semi-structured interviews of mothers who were not employed at his clinic to establish new theoretical understandings of how fairness perceptions for working mothers changed in both the home and work environment when the COVID-19 pandemic amplified both their mother and worker roles because of increased work demands and lack of childcare options. The study proposed multiple elements that directly impacted Matthew’s management of working mothers and has inspired deeper studies. Now Matthew is working on quantitative studies to support or disprove the propositions of his initial study. He has enlisted Sarah to help research this area, drawing on her vast experience managing a diverse workforce and also of the proven synergy and success of our scholarly endeavors as a team.          

Sarah’s Story: Exploring the Copywriting’s Impact on the “Bottom Line”

Sarah Willey

Sarah’s background is in marketing, nonprofit fundraising, and management. She consults with nonprofit organizations across the United States and Canada, and in the course of her work often sees opportunities for her clients and other mission organizations facing similar challenges to benefit from additional data and research. For example, many of her clients rely on her for copywriting appeals and other communications materials aimed and donors and potential donors to their cause. Academic research specifically aimed at these questions is relatively limited, and much of the best information on effective techniques comes from A/B testing conducted within organizations by their staff or consultants and presented at practitioner-oriented conferences or publications.

            The desire Sarah felt to have larger and more generalizable research available to guide the writing process with her clients led to two studies that she coauthored in 2021 with Matthew and another colleague, Maureen Casile. We randomly selected 200 nonprofit organizations and collected their mission statements as well as some key performance metrics and demographic information about the organizations. At the Engaged Management Scholarship Conference, we presented a moderation analysis of mission statement sentimentality, and at the NVivo Virtual Conference, we presented a novel methodology for discovering underlying themes in the data. The results of both studies have direct implications for nonprofit organizations as they craft their mission statements.

How You Can Ask Better Questions

There are many fantastic academics out there who have taken a different professional path to the pursuit of research. There are some other ways to gain similar experience without taking a leave of absence to explore another career. One idea to consider is consulting to get closer access and experience with real-world problems related to one’s discipline. Another is engaging in volunteer service that provides exposure to key issues – of course, after learning one of the authors works in the nonprofit sector, this suggestion had to be listed! For example, serving on a nonprofit board of directors might involve making HR decisions about the organization’s CEO, or a small nonprofit may ask board members to be engaged in crafting a marketing strategy. Finally, one can always do the second-best thing to living the experience directly and cultivate close relationships with practitioners in the space they study – having authentic conversations about their issues and how things work and allowing that to inform how to frame future research questions.

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Matthew Aplin-Houtz: While acting as COO for Body Balance Physical Medicine and as a business advisor for the Indiana Small Business Development Center, he researches in organizational behavior. Current DBA student at UMSL. MBA - Indiana State University, Master of Music degrees from Butler University and University of Maine.

Sarah Willey: A nonprofit executive, fundraising consultant, and thought leader, Sarah is passionate about bridging worlds of practice and theory, with a particular focus on issues related to management and fundraising in the nonprofit sector. She is a DBA student at UMSL and holds a Master’s in Nonprofit Management from Washington University.