You work with a public accounting firm that offers accounting and taxation services to its clients. Taxation services have been conducted online for the last 12 months. Taxation staff meet with their clients via telephone or Skype. Dropbox is used to transfer documents from clients to the taxation staff. For the last two months the accounting services staff have been working virtually. Much of the taxation work involves preparation of taxation returns for companies, partnerships and individuals. Generally the taxation work requires two appointments with the clients. In contrast, the accounting work requires ongoing contact between the accounting staff and the clients and in many cases monthly accounting reports are produced for clients. Accounting staff used cloud computing to access their clients accounting records. The firm has 50 taxation staff, 100 accounting services staff and 20 staff who provide both taxation and accounting services. The partners of the firm are would like to understand their staffs experiences about working virtually.

They ask you to conduct a qualitative research to answer the following questions concerning the virtual workplace:

What do staff believe are the advantages of the working virtually?

What problems have staff encountered when working virtually?

What suggestions do staff have to improve the virtual workplace?

Required: You have been asked to write a research plan for the research. Your plan should include the following issues and provide a justification for the choices that you have made. Write your research plan as a report, with appropriate headings for each section.

a. the objectives of the research (3 marks)

b. why a qualitative approach is more appropriate for addressing the research objectives (4 marks)

c. the population from which participants will be selected (2 marks)

d. How the sample size will be determined, (how will you determine the number of participants?) (3 marks)

e. How the sample of participants will be selected from the population (once you have determined the number of participants, how will you select them?) (4 marks)

f. How the data will be collected from participants. (4 marks)

g. For each research objective, provide an example question that could be asked of participants that will help in addressing the objective (provide three different questions.) (9 marks)

h. What steps will be taken to analyse the collected data? (9 marks)

i. What are the possible limitations to applying the findings to the other accounting firms that have implemented virtual workplaces? (4 marks)