Research Methods in Health Care, Change Management and Tourism Management


Elaboration, 2013

16 Pages


Excerpt


Q1 (theoretical framework)

Article 1 (The Effect of Changes in Servicescape and Service Quality Perceptions in a Maternity Unit)

Patient’s experience in the health care industry is always an important factor that affect the level of patient’s satisfaction if the organization aiming to remain competitive in the industry. The patient’s experience such as the perception on physical evidence (tangible cues and servicescape) played crucial roles in determining the perception on service quality and served as one of the most important dimensions in describing the service quality. The physical evidence is believed to impact on the perceptions of service quality and satisfaction which determine the intention of the patients to willingly recommending and re-patronizing in the future. In measuring, service quality, five dimensions that affect the perception of the customers have been identified which include reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles. Out of the five, the tangible aspect which refers to the physical evidence (décor, design, furniture, curtains, etc) could affect the perception of the service quality offered (Magriet and Berndt 2011).

Article 2 (Building Organizational Capabilities to Adapt Under Turmoil)

In the ever changing, dynamic and competitive business environment, organization is facing challenges in adapting to the environment. The key solution is able to adapt quickly to the environmental changes. The organization adaption is dynamic and interrelated with managerial and environmental factors. Various adaptation theories have been developed and explained how organization develop fitness such as population ecology and contingency theory but it is insufficiently to address how organization survive in endogenously environment and how they deal with uncertain future states. Most importantly, what organization capabilities are required to adapt to the changing environment is not properly explored in the previous perspectives. The organization capability refers to unique internal management processes and intangible resources which are not readily visible and copied by competitors but competitive enough to sustain turmoil condition. Moreover, competitive advantages from rigid and long standing core competencies will not be able to serve in hypercompetitive environment for long run, instead, it is quickly eroded. Therefore, companies must be more concern on creating new competitive advantage rather than relying on old ones. These strategies need speed and surprise such as emphasizing on product innovation, process and knowledge, diversification, broadening the scale and scope, internationalization and development of new managerial capabilities. Four main organizations capabilities that favoring adaptation were identified which as the heterogeneity of the dominant coalition, low degree of centralization, formalization of decision making, and low macroculture embeddedness in addition to two more capabilities explored by the author, the environmental scanning and strong organization identity (Hatum, Pettigrew, and Michelini 2010).

Q2 (three hypotheses)

Article 1 (The Effect of Changes in Servicescape and Service Quality Perceptions in a Maternity Unit)

1. There is a positive relationship/correlation between the physical evidence and the perception of service quality among the maternity patients in a private hospital setting
2. The changes of the physical evidence could influence the perception of service quality among the maternity patients in a private hospital setting
3. There is a positively significant between the nature and the roles of tangible and servicescape on the 5 core dimensions of service quality namely reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles among the maternity patients in a private hospital setting

Article 2 (Building Organizational Capabilities to Adapt Under Turmoil)

1. There is a positive relationship between the organization capability that emphasizing on anticipation of industry changes (environmental scanning) and the ability to adapt to business turmoil.
2. There is a positive relationship between the organization capabilities that emphasizing on building strong organization identity and the ability to adapt to business turmoil.
3. The most adaptable firm will show continuous changes in the organizational capabilities rather than long periods of stability with a short periods of sudden change.

Q3 (research design)

Article 1 (The Effect of Changes in Servicescape and Service Quality Perceptions in a Maternity Unit)

The research design of the articles is based on quasi-experimental design. This design is used because the researcher has little control over the treatment schedule and the treatment to the respondents must be assigned in a non random manner. This experimental design was unable to follow true experimental design which the respondents must be randomly assigned between each group. Hence, the experiment has to be carried out in field settings where the interest is actually present. The inferences made from this experiment tend to be stronger in internal validity and normally is analyzed using quantitative statistical techniques (Bhattacherjee 2012). The advantages of this design is its ability to isolate, control, and intensively examine a small number of variables but it has disadvantage, which the generalization in the real life is limited due to complexity and involving more variables. Additionally, if the research lacks of controls on variables, it may lead to inaccurate correlations. In this article, the limitation on the lacks of control over the respondents have been carefully discussed in the research limitation section which include planned selection of the maternity patient and differences in respondents in both control and experimental groups (Magriet and Berndt 2011).

Article 2 (Building Organizational Capabilities to Adapt Under Turmoil)

The research article is based on case research or comparative analysis of two case studies (Hatum, Pettigrew, and Michelini 2010). Case research is emphasizing on in-depth investigation of a problem in one or more real-life settings over an extended period of time. Data may be obtained through personal observations, interviews, and internal/external data. Case studies can be positivist in nature which is for hypotheses testing or interpretive for theory building. The advantage of using this research method is the ability to identify a wide variety of social, cultural, and political factors that might be related to the phenomenon of interest that may not be known in advance. The analysis is tend to be more qualitative in nature, but heavily contextualized and nuanced. However, the interpretation of findings relies much on the observational and integrative ability of the researcher and if lacks of control, it may be difficult to establish causality, and the findings might not be readily generalized for other cases (Bhattacherjee 2012). Generalizability can be enhanced by performing replicates and multiples case comparisons.

Q4 (sampling method)

Article 1 (The Effect of Changes in Servicescape and Service Quality Perceptions in a Maternity Unit)

The sampling method used is non-probability convenient sampling method. The population selected for this study is the admitted pregnant patients in the maternity unit for elective caesarian in the specific month (Magriet and Berndt 2011). The selected participants were the first 30 maternity patients that booked the maternity unit in the private hospital settings over four month’s period. The article also mentioned the use was made of convenience sample. Based on the information, the non-probability convenient sampling method is used because neither all pregnant patients from the hospitals nor other hospitals have the same probability of being chosen as respondents. The respondents were also from one unit or departments and did not cover many departments in many different hospitals, either private or public. This was systematically excluding some samples from the study out of convenience purpose. This might be feasible because random sampling might be difficult due to high cost and limited accessibility therefore the researchers chose samples which are close to hand, readily available and convenience. However, the opinion obtained from the study might only reflect certain groups (eg, affluent patients who can afford private hospital) and might not be representative of the opinions at large scale. Therefore, the generalizability of such observations might be limited and useful for pilot study and localized inferences (Bhattacherjee 2012).

[...]

Excerpt out of 16 pages

Details

Title
Research Methods in Health Care, Change Management and Tourism Management
College
Wawasan Open University  (Business Studies)
Course
MBA
Author
Year
2013
Pages
16
Catalog Number
V303745
ISBN (eBook)
9783668029767
ISBN (Book)
9783668029774
File size
390 KB
Language
English
Keywords
MBA, Research methods, Business Study, proposal, research design, tourism
Quote paper
Kien-Pong Yap (Author), 2013, Research Methods in Health Care, Change Management and Tourism Management, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/303745

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