DDBA 8300 Week 1 Problem Framing Paper Example

One Problem, Two Wordings: Framing a Property Manager's Slipping Lease Renewals After Maintenance Requests Moved to a Phone App, Once for Counting and Once for Explaining, Before Choosing Which Study to Run

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8300: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodology for Applied Business Research

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Problem, Two Wordings: Framing a Property Manager's Slipping Lease Renewals After Maintenance Requests Moved to a Phone App, Once for Counting and Once for Explaining, Before Choosing Which Study to Run

The Business Problem

Cedar Ridge Residential, a composite property management company in Raleigh, North Carolina, manages about 2,300 apartment units in eleven communities. Eighteen months ago it moved maintenance requests from phone calls and paper forms at the leasing office to a phone app. Since then, lease renewals have slipped: the share of residents renewing at the end of a lease fell from 58 percent to 51 percent across the portfolio. The regional manager suspects the app. Residents can now submit requests without speaking to anyone, and staff see less of them. But rents also rose by about 6 percent in the same period, and two new apartment complexes opened nearby. Whether a method can answer this problem depends on how the problem is worded, so this paper drafts it twice before choosing.

Draft One: Worded for Counting

"The general business problem is that declining lease renewals reduce revenue for apartment management companies. The specific business problem is that some property managers do not know the relationship between residents' use of a maintenance request app, the time taken to resolve requests and residents' decisions to renew their leases."

This wording asks about a relationship among variables that can be measured for many residents: app use, resolution time, renewal. It invites a correlational design using the company's records for about 1,900 leases that ended in the past year, linking each resident's maintenance history to whether they renewed, with rent change and community as controls. It could say how strongly resolution time is associated with renewal across the portfolio. It could not say why residents who left made the choice they did.

Draft Two: Worded for Explaining

"The general business problem is that declining lease renewals reduce revenue for apartment management companies. The specific business problem is that some property managers lack strategies to retain residents after moving maintenance requests to a self-service app."

This wording asks what managers do, or could do, and how residents experience the change. It invites a qualitative design, perhaps interviews with community managers who kept renewals steady after the switch and with residents who renewed or left. It could describe strategies and experiences in depth. It could not say whether app use is associated with renewal across 2,300 units, or how much of the decline it explains.

What Each Wording Commits the Study To

Edmondson and McManus (2007) argued that good management research shows methodological fit, consistency between the state of prior knowledge, the research question and the design. Where a field already offers established constructs and measures, quantitative designs that test relationships fit; where the phenomenon is new and poorly understood, qualitative designs that explore it fit better. Draft one assumes the variables are known: app use, resolution time and renewal are measurable and already recorded. Draft two assumes they are not: the study needs to find out what matters to residents and what managers do differently.

Creswell and Creswell (2018) describe the choice of approach as following from the problem, the researcher's worldview and the audience. Cedar Ridge's leadership wants to know whether to change the app or change how staff use it. They already have strong opinions about the app; what they lack is evidence on whether faster resolution goes with renewal.

The Choice

I choose draft one. Three reasons support it. First, prior research on residential satisfaction already identifies maintenance responsiveness as a factor in renewal, so the constructs exist and can be measured. Second, the company holds the records needed: every request, its timestamps and every lease outcome. Third, the decision leadership faces turns on a relationship, whether residents with slow resolution times renewed less often, which counting can address and explaining cannot.

What the Choice Gives Up

Draft one gives up the residents' own accounts. If residents left because the app made the company feel distant, even when requests were resolved quickly, a records study would miss it. I will note that limitation in the proposal and suggest that a later qualitative study could follow up with residents who left. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) caution that research questions built to fill obvious gaps can miss the assumptions underneath a problem; here, the unexamined assumption is that resolution time is what residents care about. The design will include app use, not only resolution time, as a variable, so that the data can show whether using the app at all, rather than speed, is associated with leaving.

Next Step

The specific problem in draft one becomes the basis for the research question in Week 4's audit, where it will be checked for any second study hiding inside it.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0188

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Edmondson, A. C., & McManus, S. E. (2007). Methodological fit in management field research. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1246-1264. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2007.26586086