Suppose you are employed by a major retailer and you suffer, like most retailers, from a substantial amount of shrinkage (shoplifting and employee theft). Further suppose that someone proposes to you that employee theft is related to job satisfaction. In other words it’s proposed that employees who are happy with their jobs are a lot less likely to steal from you than employees who are dissatisfied. Rather than spending much of the budget on trying to improve employee satisfaction without actually knowing if such a relationship exists, you decide on trying to find out if job satisfaction is indeed related to employee theft. Assume that you cannot find any previous research about this relationship.

1a. how would you go about trying to determine if such a relationship existed?

1b. what are the flaws in your study?

2a. what is a completely different approach to determining if such a relationship existed?

2b. what are the flaws in your second approach? Instructor’s note there is several approaches that you might take to this problem. In general, they would fall into three broad categories. These categories are not always pure types. There may be some crossover between them.