Topic outline

  • Welcome to this online course on qualitative and quantitative research methods!

     

    This Master-level course introduces you to research methods applied in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation management. It follows self-paced learning principles, and offers some flexibility in deciding the order of learning topics. In particular, the course focuses on how to collect reliable data by providing exercises for different data collection techniques, such as interviews, observations, surveys, and secondary data (e.g. news articles, tweets, Facebook/Youtube comments). Further, the course focuses on how to do good qualitative research by introducing and challenging you on some of the most common qualitative research designs, as well as offering training in techniques for qualitative analysis, for example the ‘Gioia method’, discourse analysis, critical incident analysis, visual methods, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The course also addresses how to do good quantitative research by learning some basic techniques for conducting statistical analysis, such as descriptive statistics, bivariate and partial correlations, factor analysis, reliability tests, linear regression and logistic regression, as well as challenging you to review its application in published studies. In sum, through a number of small exercises you engage with the basics of qualitative as well as quantitative research, and engage more deeply in one research methodology of your interest in the final assignment.

    We hope this course supports developing your academic knowledge and skills.

     

    Some suggestions to create learning synergies with other Aalto courses:

    This course works complementary to other Aalto research method courses, such as ‘26E02900 Doing Quantitative Analysis’ or ‘21E00011 Doing Qualitative Research’.

    If you are interested in learning more about entrepreneurship and innovation management research, or you are writing a thesis on the topic, we recommend to combine this course with the online course ‘25E55000 Entrepreneurship and Society’ to strengthen your theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship research.