Research Design

Research design consists of details and procedures for gathering information to provide a structure for conducting the research (Malhotra et al. 2012) with the main intention to address specific research objectives. In this stage, a number of decisions are to be made to operationalize research objectives and ensure coherence with various elements of the research project (Saunders Philip Thornhill, Adrian. 2015) This section helps to plan out research boundaries such as defining unit of analysis, details of investigation types, handling data collection techniques, data analysis and interpretations along with any other related issues.

Research design is normally categorised into exploratory, confirmatory or conclusive type of enquiry (Malhotra et al. 2012). In exploratory types of research, as the name exploratory suggests, is aimed at providing insights of the research phenomena in study where there is little known information in literature, whereas a conclusive research is aimed at justifying any relationships and assists in evaluating research phenomena and also for decision making in a given situation (Malhotra et al. 2012; Malhotra 2010; Churchill & Iacobucci 2004;

Gerring 2001) . Exploratory research studies mostly includes subject expert interviews, observations and focus groups, whereas conclusive type research studies includes

108 identifying the information first of what is required prior to conducting research from either cross-sectional or longitudinal designs which would conclude or justify the hypothesised relationships (Kerlinger 1986).

Conclusive type of research is mainly deductive type of enquiry and greatly relies on the strategic statistical analysis to determine the outcome to support or reject the research hypothesis (Meyers et al. 2006). Conclusive type of study settings can either be of causal, correlational or descriptive. In the causal type of research, all the variables are involved in cause-and-effect relationships and they are examined by experimentation or intermediation which is known to provide a reliable way to determine cause and affect outcomes (where experiments are usually monitored and variables are allowed to be manipulated in a controlled environment) (Churchill & Iacobucci 2004). Churchill & Iacobucci (2004); whereas in the correlational type of setting, research involves investigating the associations and relationships between the independent and dependent variables (Churchill & Iacobucci 2004; Sekaran 2003). These conclusive types of design may further be classified into either cross- sectional or longitudinal research designs which will be discussed in detail in next section. In the descriptive type of research, the research phenomenon is described and the research is carried out to evaluate certain variable characteristics in more detail which contributes towards the phenomenon (Parasuraman, 1991).

Choosing the appropriate research design is challenging and this entails re-examining the research purpose and outcome and involves meticulous planning ahead (Collis & Hussey 2013). Based on the major variations in the research design approaches – are exploratory

109 and conclusive according to Malhotra et.al., (2012), both these strategies may be approached considering the context of the elements in the conceptual framework (Malhotra et al. 2012). However reflecting on the main objective of this research, which is to evaluate and examine the relationship between digital media characteristics and SGS outcomes, earlier research works have been examined in IS literature using various theoretical perspectives -where it is seen that some authors have attempted to create new theories to understand this (Dennis et al. 2008; Dennis & Valacich 1999a), and some have just highlighted the importance of further understanding the influence of digital technological developments on everyday goals; subsequently there exists rich literature with studies that addresses issues of influence on everyday uses and goals, thus slightly relating to the research problem to be examined in this study, consequently this study was not considered under exploratory research.

To consider any research under conclusive- causal category (causal- confirmatory) - Hair et al. (2010) have claimed that in the circumstances the research should be mainly driven by use of theory and all the variables need to be examined in causality research that leads to a phenomenon and may take a long time, and can sometimes get very complex, and also turn out to be expensive (Joseph F Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, et al. 2010). Other variables other than the ones identified in this research may very well exist and since they are not considered in the research that may be able to illuminate other correlations. In the current study, examining all variables that leads to the phenomenon is not practical or feasible and thus this study cannot be categorised under causal types of study.

110 Based on the purpose of this current study under objective perspective, this study aims to examine the significance of relationship between digital media and SGS outcomes (Joseph F Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, et al. 2010; Churchill & Iacobucci 2004; Zikmund 2003), where in this category, a study normally comprises of research design and data collection and may contain questionnaire to gather entries from respondents from a limited number of choices to be chosen from (Joseph F Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, et al. 2010), these type of studies are often classed as confirmatory. In confirmatory type of studies, hypotheses are formulated and then using defined structure- data is collected and analysed to understand the relationships of the phenomenon, unlike exploratory research types (Joseph F Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, et al. 2010; Malhotra 2008).

Based on this, the setting of this study is correlational and confirmatory and this is based on the purpose of the study under objective perspective, where the main objective of this research is to confirm the existence of relationships between independent and dependent variables and to find their statistical significance using the conceptual framework. Thus this study adopts conclusive – correlational (correlational- confirmatory) types of research study to justify the existence of relationships between variables, which being characteristically objective and the evidence will be gathered by empirical observation (Collis & Hussey 2010).