Blind Qualitative Hypothesis Testing: An Illustration

Assignment Deliverables

This assignment requires you to read and annotate ONE academic journal publications  of quantitative article. This annotation contributes 10% and the deadline of submission

For all annotation, your final submission should include the

• Completed Annotation in MS Words or Pdf format.

Annotation Format

Your article annotation should have four sections as described below:

1. Title of the Article

2. Name of the Author(s)

3. Source of the Article

a. Journal Name

b. Publication Details – Year, Volume, Issue, and page nos.

1. Purpose of Research – summarize aim of the study and specific research objectives

2. Nature of Research – is the study exploratory, descriptive, causal?

3. Model – describe the model proposed in the study

4. Conclusion summarize the major findings of the study.

 1. Research Method – describe in detail the research method used in this study.

If the author(s) does not discuss the research method in detail, or the explanation is not clear from the article, please refer to external 

sources.

2. Data Collection

a. Identify the prime mode of data collection.

b. Describe the process of data collection.

c. Discuss the measuring instrument.

3. Sampling Technique

a. Identify the target population.

b. Describe the sampling technique.

c. Assess how well the sample represents the population.

4.Evaluating Qualitative Research – Trustworthiness. Describe the efforts made by the researcher(s) to relate to Credibility (parallels internal validity); Dependability (parallels external validity); Transferability (parallels reliability); Confirmability (parallels objectivity).

d. Describe the tools used for analyzing the data.

Use this space to note your overall evaluation of the article. In your opinion, how good this article was compared to other articles, either in the discipline/area, or in the same journal. 

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose and illustrate blind qualitative hypothesis testing, which is a qualitative research technique that further generalizes the well-known notion of “blindness” in research to include a qualitative researcher. The technique introduces a method to test a priori hypotheses using qualitative, emergent observation and analysis without the biasing influence of prior knowledge of the hypotheses being tested.

Design/methodology/approach  In essence, the proposed technique is as follows. After forming a set of a priori predictive hypotheses, a theoretical researcher (who may or may not be a qualitative researcher) engages the cooperation of a qualitative researcher to perform an empirical study. The qualitative empirical researcher is given adequate guidance to perform a study but is kept blind to the hypotheses. After the qualitative empirical researcher makes observations and forms his or her conclusions, the qualitative empirical researcher and the theoretical researcher jointly determine the extent to which the conclusions support or disconfirm the hypotheses. The qualitative empirical researcher then identifies emergent themes and inductive conclusions that contribute beyond the a priori hypotheses. A study testing consumer response to advertising is described as an illustration of the proposed technique.

Findings The proposed technique diminishes the influence of the ontological assumptions of researchers on hypothesis tests. By reducing a priori expectations, the proposed technique frees practical and academic market researchers to more fully immerse in the context of interest and better recognize subtle phenomena and imbricated, complex intrapersonal and/or social interactions. Furthermore, the proposed technique provides a new way for qualitative methods to go beyond the “supportive” and “exploratory” role to which they have often been limited. Originality/value  An ability to test hypotheses gives qualitative researchers another way to contribute to the literatures currently dominated by constricted and pallid questionnaire-based methods within the positivist tradition. Such literatures will benefit from the methodological pluralism encouraged by the technique introduced here because some benefits of qualitative research (including an ability to identify unanticipated, emergent findings) offer much needed compensation for inherent flaws in questionnaire-based methods. Keywords Qualitative methods, Advertising Paper type Technical paper.