ABSTRACT
Researchers in the administrative and management sciences are no longer required to follow a single paradigm or design for their investigations. Instead, many different research approaches are acceptable. To help clarify this great variety of options in research designs, they can be grouped into just three broad categories: qualitative, quantitative, and combined (or mixed) designs. Each design supports a variety of methods for gathering data, and each allows the researcher a variety of analysis and interpretation approaches. A key task of the director of the research project is to select the appropriate strategy for the research problem and study objectives. This selection task is what is known as the process of developing a research design.
