Anuschka Schmitt

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Management of Information Systems and Digital Innovation. This course is not available as an outside option to students on other programmes.

This course will deliver the core methodological training for students in the MSc in MISDI. It covers issues of empirical research design and research methods for information systems (IS) studies, including qualitative, quantitative, design science, and computational research.

Lectures delivered by a diverse pool of scholars from the ISI group will introduce the principles of selected research design issues and methodological approaches while contextualising this teaching in relation to IS research as part of both the lectures and the seminars. Seminars also delivered by ISI faculty will provide students with hands-on opportunities to develop their own research design and to gain further in-depth expertise on specific methods.

The topics covered will include discussions of the alignment between research question and research design, questions of inference, and the relationship between theory and data, as well as brief introductions to research methods, with a focus on when they will be appropriate to particular questions and projects. Drawing on a variety of examples in IS literature, the course will provide a platform for students to consider a range of design options and methodological techniques. Both lectures and seminars will draw on multimedia resources (e.g., books, journal papers, in-class applications, statistical reports).

The course is intended to better equip students to design, collect and analyse data for their own dissertations, as well as help students to become more informed and critical readers of social scientific, and specifically information systems, research.

20 hours of lectures and 14 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

To help contextualise the materials covered in the course for the students, and to ensure a good fit with the requirements of the MISDI dissertation, lectures for this course will be delivered by faculty from the Information Systems and Innovation Group of the Department of Management. The seminars will also be led by staff from the Information Systems and Innovation Group of the Department of Management.

Students submit a draft research proposal.

• Agresti, A. and Finlay, B. (2009) Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences [4th edition].  
• Prentice Hall. Berente, N., Seidel, S., & Safadi, H. (2019). Research commentary—data-driven computationally intensive theory development. Information systems research, 30(1), 50-64. 
• Flick, U. (2014) An Introduction to Qualitative Research [5th edition]. Sage. 
• Karahanna, E., Benbasat, I., Bapna, R., & Rai, A. (2018). Editor’s comments: Opportunities and challenges for different types of online experiments. MIS quarterly, 42(4), iii-x. 
• King, G., Keohane, R. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry. Princeton University Press. 
• Klein, H. K., and Myers, M. D. (1999). A Set of Principles for Conducting and Evaluating Interpretive Field Studies in Information Systems. 
• Robson, C. and McCartan, K. (2016) Real World Research [4th edition].  John Wiley. 
• Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford University Press. 
• Walsham, G. (2006). Doing Interpretive Research. European Journal of Information Systems 15(3): 320-330. 
• Yin, R. K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods. Sixth Edition. Los Angeles: SAGE. 

Proposal (100%).

For detailed assessment information, including all deadlines and timings, please see the relevant course Moodle page. Assessment timings will be available at the start of each term.