An Exercise to Move from Problems to Research

Moving from problems to research projects
SUBGROUP COMPARISONS:
How do apartment dwellers differ from homeowners in the sports they watch and pay for?
How do traffic patterns in our web site differ from those who click through different categories of news articles?
Which policing methods are most effective in lowering property crime in our city?

PREDICTIVE MODELS:
What are the purchasing patterns that indicate that a female customer is probably pregnant?
What variables measured by the sensors inside this machine predict when it is at high risk of malfunctioning?
How much more likely is a customer to default on the loan he/she holds with us if a new charge appears on his/her credit report?
What factors indicate a high risk that a high-value customer may move to a competitor?

SENTIMENT ANALYSES:
Is employee morale adversely impacted by the new overtime pay and new healthcare copayment regulations which reduced benefits to employees?
How is sentiment toward our brand evolving in response to our cooperation with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts?
Is our proactive, Twitter based approach to dealing with our recent recall helping control damage from our recent public relations fiasco?

COMPLEX MULTIVARIATE ANALYSES:
How could our firm route our aircraft taking into account travel patterns, weather, customer demand, and competition’s routing?
What factors should play a role in my trading for stocks algorithm, and how should I weight them?
What factors should I consider in hiring the new CEO to turnaround this declining firm?

Now move from the problem statement to a conceptual frame that becomes your research model.
ASSIGNMENT: Pick one of the several suggested pathways, and then think of a real-life problem and develop a research project idea. Submit 1-page research idea statement with a specification of the problem and research analyses that will be conducted.