Excerpt from course description

Research for Marketing Decisions I

Introduction

Research Methodology – provides students with a comprehensive and integrated understanding of how knowledge is generated, evaluated, and applied within both academic marketing research and business‑oriented marketing research. The course introduces the theoretical, philosophical, and methodological foundations that guide rigorous inquiry, including perspectives on theory development, causality, validity, and measurement.

Students will engage with the full research process, from formulating research problems and hypotheses to making informed decisions about sampling, measurement strategies, and research design. The course also develops students’ ability to critically assess methodological choices and their implications for research quality. Through hands‑on work with empirical examples, students will learn how to craft and communicate research insights effectively—whether in an academic paper, master’s thesis, or professional research report.

Course content

Module 1: Foundations of Research in Marketing

Purpose: Build shared understanding of the research process and its philosophical, ethical, and strategic foundations.

Topics:

  • Role of research in marketing decision-making
  • The research process: from problem definition to actionable insight
  • Types of research: exploratory, descriptive, causal, qualitative
  • Validity, reliability, and measurement issues
  • Research ethics and transparenc

Module 2: Research Design & Data Collection

Purpose: Equip students with tools to design sound studies and collect appropriate data—qualitative and quantitative.

Topics:

  • Designing causal vs descriptive studies
  • Sampling methods and tradeoffs
  • Survey and experimental research design
  • Qualitative and exploratory approaches (e.g., interviews, focus groups, observational research)
  • Introduction to text mining/content analysis

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.