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Weekly UpdatesA good way to explore the full dimensions of a problem is to examine it first hand, with field-based, qualitative research--using a collaboration between a practitioner and a researcher.
The concept of qualitative research is potentially exciting both for the researcher and for the practitioners whose organization will be under study. The idea behind research projects is that they will create new findings for the hospitality community while at the same time provide the host organization with competitive insights about itself. Despite the potential value of such studies, the astute hospitality manager also probably wonders about the hidden costs in letting researchers "inside the door." We can all conjure images of the crazed researcher running around the hotel scaring employees into participating in some study and prompting managers to worry that researchers will run amok, creating more havoc than good. Such managers might further wonder what happens if they end up having to redirect academics who just "don't get it," or worse yet, waste the company's time and resources. In fact, managers may ask, what is it that researchers are trying to do, anyway?
In this article I discuss the role of qualitative research, its value to hospitality knowledge, and its potential value to hospitality organizations. I also explore the critical role that hospitality managers can play in aiding the research process in a way that best serves their needs, advances knowledge of the field, and benefits the overall industry. (1)
This article has three sections. In the first section I discuss concepts behind qualitative research, including its chief goal, which is the creation of new knowledge. Then I explore the types of qualitative research that academics may perform in organizations, including validity and accuracy checks they should initiate. In the final section I offer ideas on ways that managers can work with researchers to provide organizations with the richest possible returns from research projects.
The What and Why of Qualitative Research
The goal of most researchers is to create new knowledge in their field on a topic that excites them (and if truth be told, simultaneously gain a reputation in the community as the originator of that knowledge). Organizational research is unlike most scientific research in that it is applied, meaning that researchers study people, their problems, and their challenges in the subjects' own particular organizational settings. Research questions are derived by the need to understand what makes organizations and the people who run them effective at what they do. A researcher's goal is to uncover the not-so-obvious, counterintuitive findings that advance our understanding of a phenomenon and also provide managers with useful information that can be immediately applied to solve their problems. Simultaneously, researchers' goal is to challenge the conventional assumptions that frame how managers make decisions and run their organizations. (2)
The Exciting Theory
Those goals are a tall order. To understand a complex phenomenon, researchers often need to make small, incremental steps that provide perspective on a theory but which offer little towards a manager's understanding of a problem. True to the notion that research findings often lag management practices, (3) the challenge inherent in this process reminds me of the time when I had discovered what I thought was an exciting research finding. When I shared the "finding" with my mother, she replied in her kindest voice, "Well, that's obvious. After one year of working at a school, I could have told you that." To get to the point where theories are exciting and useful, though, researchers often have to take the incremental, seemingly obvious steps. Such steps help researchers to understand the phenomena that they study in such a way that they become better prepared to make the ground-breaking leaps that hospitality practitioners are expecting and hoping academe will provide.
Qualitative Research: The Contributing Factor
Qualitative research plays a critical role in creating new theories that offer managers helpful insights into nagging problems. As part of building theory and creating new knowledge, researchers first identify the constructs or phenomena being studied. They next identify any causal relationships between these constructs. In other words, through applying previous research findings and developing causal logic, researchers build arguments as to why and how one construct affects a second one. (4) The constructs and the relationships between those constructs are brought together into a conceptual landscape or theoretical model. (5) Sound theoretical models offer convincing logic to address a previously ignored question or problem about organizations and the people who work in them. From these models, researchers create variables to reflect their constructs and develop hypotheses that depict the relationships between them.
How does qualitative research fir into all of this? To best answer this question, I first offer the following working definition: Qualitative research refers to an interpretative method of collecting and analyzing data to explore and explain a phenomenon. Researchers who adopt this method "study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them." (6) Those who perform qualitative research seek to understand the situationally based "local perspective." (7) Specifically, they seek to learn how "people in particular settings come to derstand, account for, take action, and otherwise manage their day-to-day situations," (8) as well as study the interactions these people have with others that cause them to form these perspectives. Thus, qualitative research is aimed at understanding how and why an organization's members view a particular issue and the ways they behave as a result. Its goal is to build an understanding and reconstructio n of the constructs other people hold. (9) Given that organizational research is by definition applied field work, a qualitative perspective is crucial to helping researchers truly understand what they study. When using a qualitative approach, the researcher's view or interpretation is substituted with that of respondents.
Qualitative research plays four critical roles in helping researchers create exciting theories that also have immediate, practical implications for managers. First, through understanding how and why respondents view a particular issue through "rich, thick description," (10) qualitative-research findings act as the building blocks of new theories. Using the results of in-depth interviews on motivation, for example, a researcher can analyze the interview transcripts and categorize key themes that emerge from the data on factors that encourage performance. These themes can potentially be used to develop constructs and the logical relationships between them, thus forming the essentials of theoretical models. Before researchers even formulate and test their hypotheses, they can use qualitative research findings to identify the important ways in which hospitality managers view a particular problem, such as why employees leave their organization. If analyzed appropriately, these viewpoints can be used to advance our theoretical understanding of a problem and serve as a point from which a model can be tested on a wider audience.
Qualitative research findings often identify the not-so-obvious perspectives that are foreign to researchers, who unlike managers, are not "in the trenches" and provide the tenets of interesting, provocative theoretical models in a way that previous research findings alone cannot. Thus, qualitative-research findings can act as the seeds of more-interesting research studies from which researchers can identify meaningful, relevant constructs and create compelling causal logic from the original source, namely, organization members. Studies of this type have the potential to be groundbreaking for both academics and practitioners.
The second role that qualitative research plays is to help interpret quantitative research findings. Once researchers identify a problem to be studied and create the constructs in a theoretical model, they develop a set of variables and related hypotheses to examine. To do so, they often collect quantitative data, using surveys, for example, or a restaurant's operational results. Researchers who use a quantitative approach emphasize ways in which they empirically measure their data, often collecting it from a wide variety of sources and testing it using statistical methods to help improve the generalizability of their findings. The challenge with quantitative research is that it often reports empirical findings without being able to explain why they occurred. Many times researchers end their reports with implications, in which they theorize why their results turned out the way they did and offer their ideas as avenues for future research." Qualitative research, with its interpretive strength, can help solidif y such theorizing. When researchers simultaneously use several methods to address the weaknesses inherent in each one (a process called triangulation), they can improve the strength and, usually, the trustworthiness of their findings.
In an interesting study of service in a major convenience-store chain, (11) for instance, researchers used previous research findings to predict that the more the store's employees displayed positive emotions toward customers (such as offering a greeting, saying thank you, smiling, and making eye contact), the greater the store's sales. In actuality, the researchers found that the opposite relationship existed--that is, the better the customer service, the lower the store's sales. Unable to explain their quantitative findings, the researchers initiated a second, qualitative study whereby the researchers worked as store clerks; attended a customer-service workshop; conducted over 150 hours of interviews with store executives, field supervisors, customer-service representatives and managers; and visited 40 of the 576 stores used in the sample. They also studied the sample's most- and least-successful stores in depth. Applying their qualitative findings, they revised their original model, including the ordering of their variables, and reanalyzed their original data to find that a store's pace--that is, whether it was busy or slow (reflected in line length and store sales)--predicted whether sales clerks could display positive emotions.
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