MGMT 8900M Week 6 Alignment Check Example

Three Seams, One Slip: An Alignment Check on a Prospectus About How Regional Airport Managers Negotiate With Carriers Threatening to Exit, Testing Each Join With a Conditional Question and Moving the Research Question Back Under the Purpose

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8900M: Prospectus Development and Alignment

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Seams, One Slip: An Alignment Check on a Prospectus About How Regional Airport Managers Negotiate With Carriers Threatening to Exit, Testing Each Join With a Conditional Question and Moving the Research Question Back Under the Purpose

The Four Statements, Unchanged

Problem: Regional airports that lose scheduled airline service lose passengers, tenants and parking revenue, and airport managers increasingly negotiate with carriers that threaten to end service; how these managers conduct such negotiations has not been described.

Purpose: Across several airports treated as cases, the study will explore how managers of regional airports negotiate with airlines that threaten to exit a route.

Research question: To what extent do incentive packages offered by regional airports predict whether a carrier keeps its route?

Nature of the study: Five to seven regional airports, each treated as one qualitative case, studied through interviews with airport managers and review of agreements and board minutes.

Seam One: Problem to Purpose

The test: if the purpose were achieved, would the problem's unknown be known? The problem's unknown is how managers conduct negotiations with carriers threatening to exit. The purpose sets out to explore exactly that, with the same population and the same event. Yes, the seam holds. Newman and Covrig (2013) argued that the title, problem, purpose and questions of a study should share their key terms so that each can be traced to the others; these two share manager, negotiate and exit.

Seam Two: Purpose to Question

The test: if the question were answered, would the purpose be achieved? No. The purpose sets out to explore how managers negotiate, a process. The question asks to what extent incentive packages predict whether a carrier keeps its route, which is a relationship between a variable and an outcome. Answering it would tell us whether incentives work; it would not tell us how managers negotiate. The question has also changed its subject, from managers to incentive packages, and its event, from negotiating to the carrier's decision.

Seam Three: Question to Design

The test: could the named design produce an answer to the question? Again no. A question about the extent to which a factor predicts an outcome needs measured outcomes across many airports, enough to estimate a relationship while accounting for market size, distance to a hub and other influences. A qualitative case study of five to seven airports cannot estimate that. Yin (2018) pairs case study with how and why questions asked about present-day events in their setting; the purpose's how question belongs there, while the research question's to-what-extent question does not.

The Slip and Its Repair

The slip is in the research question. Two seams fail, and both failures trace to the same statement, while the problem, purpose and design agree with each other. There were two ways to repair it. Moving the purpose and design toward the question would mean a quantitative study of incentives and route retention across many airports, which would need a data set of incentive agreements that is not publicly available in a consistent form, and would leave the problem's unknown, how managers negotiate, unaddressed. Moving the question toward the purpose keeps the problem, purpose and design intact and requires changing one sentence. Maxwell (2013) treats the components of a qualitative design as interacting, so that a change in one may require changes in others; here, a change in the question requires none elsewhere.

The question is moved. Revised research question: How do managers of regional airports negotiate with airlines that threaten to end service on a route?

Rerunning the check, the purpose-to-question seam now holds, since answering how managers negotiate achieves the purpose of exploring how they negotiate, and the question-to-design seam holds, since a how question about a contemporary event the researcher cannot control is what a multiple case study is built to answer. The role of incentive packages can still appear in the findings, as part of how managers describe their negotiating, without becoming the study's question.

References

Maxwell, J. A. (2013). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3rd ed.). SAGE.

Newman, I., & Covrig, D. M. (2013). Building consistency between title, problem statement, purpose, & research questions to improve the quality of research plans and reports. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 25(1), 70-79. https://doi.org/10.1002/nha.20009

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). SAGE.