Research Design (50 marks)

Researchers have coined the term the "Great Resignation" to describe the large number of employees that have been leaving their jobs, especially at entry level positions. Fruity Flavors, a multi-location retail franchise selling nutritious fruit beverages, has seen the evidence of this throughout their 40 outlets across Singapore.

Out of a total workforce of 1,000 employees, they have had 50 resignations in 2019, 80 in 2020 and 130 in 2021. The management is very concerned about these numbers especially considering the challenges that they are having with recruiting new employees as well as the cost of training.

In order to understand the issues in greater depth, they have asked you in your role as the Quality Assurance Manager, to design and conduct a research study. They have given you a limited budget and a small time frame of 4 weeks to research and present the report to senior management.

Required: Answer all of the following questions related to this scenario

1. Develop a specific research question for this study.
2. Recommend the dependent, independent and moderating variables that you could investigate.
3. Evaluate the ethical issues that you should consider when conducting this particular research project and how to handle them.
4. As an internal researcher, what special considerations should you take into account?
5. Recommend three different types of secondary information that you could access and what information you will hope to find from these resources before you begin your study. Discuss the relative reliability of each of the various sources.
6. Assess how you could use the interview technique in this case. Explain who you would interview and how you would establish rapport.
7. Assume that you have decided to arrange a focus group. Justify who you might include as participants and how you would conduct this session.
8. Assume that you are creating a questionnaire to administer to the employees in this scenario. Develop an example of the following: (i) a question that would require an answer providing nominal data, (ii) a question that would require an answer providing ratio data, (iii) a question that would require an answer providing interval data and (iv) an open-ended question
9. How would you effectively present the information that you find in your research?