The  Purpose of this Paper Being  able to think clearly, organize  your ideas, and communicate your  findings are important professional skills .  Most every industry, including  health care, education, and the  military  value employees who  are able  to apply basic research skills — especially  in vague, uncertain, or  undefined  projects.  This  paper  will  challenge you to  address a situation that  requires you present a professional report to solve a problem. 

Skills  Practiced 

1. Identifying  the  type of study you will carry out (qualitative, quantitative, deductive, inductive, explanatory, exploratory etc .) as well as the clearly  justifying why. 

2. Reading  and understanding background information  on problem drinking and finding out how  other researchers  have defined and  operationalized  the variables in their study. 

3. Conceptualizing and operationalizing variables,  and defining indicators. 

4. Assigning levels of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio). 

5. Choosing  measurement activities and data collection strategies.

The Issue of “Problem Drinking” You are working at Company X , a Forbes 500 corporation with over 32,000 employees in  offices around  the world . You work in  personnel  management  where supervisors have tasked your team with  researching worker productivity. For the past year, a series of  discrete, open – ended  preliminary  exit – interviews about the overall company culture with  departing  employees, your team notes that  interviewees bring up  the “hard partying” ethos of  Company X repeatedly.  Interview transcripts from 5 employees bring up themes and  observation  ranging from “just a bit wild” and “we work hard, play hard” to “excessive” and “abusive.” You  already see the challenge — what separates problem drinking from recreational, social, or casual drinking? What factor s play into problematic drinking?

Your  immediate supervisor has some social research background but makes it clear  you are to lead your team in designing  a study to assess“ problem drinking” among X Corporation employees and its  relationship with worker  productivity. You’’ll need a clear idea of what you mean by this term by reviewing the research literature and formulating  a plan to organize the study.

Consider  this  issue and develop a 3 – 4 page  proposal on How you would  design the  overall type of  study,  define concepts,  operationalize variables, indicators,  and sample employees, How would you  ensure validity and reliability, and address ethical data gathering.