Research Design

This chapter represents the research methodology for the study on exploring the impact of Human Resource Management practices on employee’s retention, with a special focus on the evidence from the Food and Beverage industry in the state of Qatar. Research methodology presents the basic strategy to be followed for data collection and analysis. This chapter will highlight the chosen data type, research design, its strengths and limitations, sampling technique and size, tools and technique of data collection, method of analysis, timeline, and ethical issues involved in the data collection process. The researcher collected primary data through a survey on the employees, who had left their previous organizations in the Food and Beverage industry in Qatar in the past 6 to 12 months of the survey. The research methodology is as follows:

Research design refers to the systematic approach that is used to conduct a scientific research study. It represents an overall synchronization of the components of research and the data leading to a plausible conclusion (Lewis 2015). There are four types of research designs, namely, exploratory, explanatory, descriptive and evaluation research. In the given study, the researcher focused on exploring the effect of HRM practices on the employee retention, and hence, the topic could be best explained with primary data. Primary data is the one that is collected directly from the field of study, that is, people, who are directly affected or involved in the research subject (Heiman 2013). Thus, to address the research question, the researcher chose the descriptive research design. Under descriptive design, the researcher got the scope to observe, study or analyze the subjects and finally describing the behavioral pattern without influencing the subject (Rovai, Baker and Ponton 2013). Descriptive research design includes approaches like case studies, survey, and observational research. In this study, the researcher followed survey approach under descriptive research design.

Descriptive research is beneficial in presenting an in-depth overview of the research topic. This type of research design presents extremely valuable detailed observations. This allows the researchers to observe the research participants in an unchanged and natural environment and results in a more unbiased outcome. It is also beneficial to identify the variables that can be examined further and thereby creates scope for further research. The data collection method allows the researchers to gather detailed information about the subjects that can be either qualitative or quantitative in nature. Thus, it is beneficial for collecting multifaceted data and large amount of data, which leads to precise outcomes. Survey is one such descriptive research method that helps in collecting large amount of data within a short time, and hence, it is commonly used by organisations to gather information about the beliefs, behaviours, habits and attitudes of the target audience in their natural environment (Nardi 2018). Moreover, the reliability of primary data is quite high, hence, survey method is mostly used to collect information directly from the participants.

The limitations of this type of research design include its inability to determine a causal relationship, and lack of guarantee that the participants provide truthful data. The information gathered through this study does not always help to determine the cause and effect relationship between the variables. The researcher must be very careful while observing the participants as they can change their behaviour if they know that they are being observed. Similarly, during a survey, the researcher must choose their words very cautiously, especially for a sensitive issue, as the participants might get offended or might be scared to answer truthfully due to social norms. Moreover, confidentiality can be an issue during the survey, which would make the participants about answering the questions truthfully and that might lead to unscientific and unreliable outcome (De Vaus 2013). At the same time, the outcome or interpretation may be affected by researcher’s biasness. Moreover, this type of research design, that is, survey method cannot target a big geographical region and focus only on a smaller region.

Strengths and Limitations of Descriptive Research Design

Population of a study refers to the group of individuals sharing common characteristics (Levy and Lemeshow 2013). The population must have the similar characteristics as that creates the foundation of the data collection for the study. There should be some general demographic factors, such as, age, sex etc. and some study specific factors for collecting the data. In this study, the common characteristic of the group of individuals to be studied is that they must belong to the food and beverage industry of Qatar. Hence, gender, years of association with the food and beverage industry and reasons for leaving previous organisation were considered as the base of the grouping of the population for the study. There are a huge number of people working in the food and beverage industry of Qatar. From them, 200 people were chosen as the population for the study, based on their tenure and their contact information was collected from two organisations in this industry.  A sample is drawn from these 200 people for data collection.

There are two types of sampling technique, probability and non-probability (Palinkas et al. 2015). Probability sampling technique illustrates that all the respondents are able to participate in the research and can get equal opportunity. In other words, all the samples have equal chance of being selected and selection is random. On the other hand, Levy and Lemeshow (2013) highlight that non-probability sampling technique does not provide equal chances for getting equal opportunity for participating in the research. The judgment of the researcher influences the chance of being chosen of the samples. The most commonly used probability sampling techniques are simple random sampling, cluster sampling, stratified and systematic sampling, and some of the most common non-probability sampling techniques are purposive sampling, quota sampling, snow-ball sampling (Setia 2016). In the given study, the researcher used simple random sampling to select the employees in the Food and Beverage industry in Qatar to minimize the chances of sampling error or fluctuations and biasness in the data.

By applying the simple random sampling technique, the researcher chose almost 25% of the chosen population of the study, that is, 53 food and beverage employees. Among the 53 employees, 50 belonged to the Front and Back of House job profiles, while 3 employees belonged to the management position in the industry. These type of job profiles and positions were chosen to get the information that would reflect the attitudes of employees belonging to these sectors.

As mentioned earlier, the researcher collected primary data by applying the survey method. Thus, a survey questionnaire was the data collection or research instrument. The questionnaire contained 14 close ended questions, divided in two sections, demographic and non-demographic. The demographic section contained questions on gender, years of association with the organization, and few workplace related factors, such as, top 5 reasons of leaving previous organization, factors that made the respondents happy at work, their achievement desires and goals at the workplace. This section aimed to gather an overview of the attitude of the respondents about their current or previous workplace. The non-demographic section contained two parts, quantitative study on the effective HR practices and factors of employee retention. These sections collected the response data in 5 point rating or replicable scale, such as, Likert scale, in which 1 denotes ‘strongly disagree’ and 5 denotes ‘strongly agree’. The quantitative data collection section contained questions that were framed in a way that would best describe the factors influencing employee retention and HR practices (Joshi et al. 2015). The aim of this section was to gather information on the elements that influence the employees to stay associated with the organizations in food and beverage industries or leave the organizations. The survey questionnaire was designed using Google form.

Population of the Study

The researcher chose two large food and beverage companies in Doha, Qatar and from their HR database, found the names and contacts of the employees, who had joined the organization within the past 6 to 12 months. After applying the simple random sampling technique to choose the sample size, the chosen survey respondents were contacted via e-mail or face to face to inform them about the purpose of the survey and its terms and conditions. They were given the link to the questionnaire through their emails or hardcopies by meeting them in person. The survey was conducted for 5 weeks. 

Validity and reliability analysis was performed after the research instrument was prepared. Different types of validity processes are there, that are used to examine the accuracy of the research instrument. Those are face validity, content validity and construct validity. Face validity is the estimate of if a test appears to evaluate a certain criterion (Bolarinwa 2015). However, there is no guarantee that it would actually measure the research phenomena. Content validity refers to a non-statistical type of validity involving a systematic evaluation of the study content. This is done with a purpose of testing of whether it was covering all the relevant aspects or characteristics of the representative sample (Escamirosa et al. 2015). Lastly, construct validity refers to the concept of measuring the extent of accuracy of the instrument, that is, to what extent the instrument is accurate in measuring the research topic is the concept of construct validity (Heale and Twycross 2015).

In the given study, the survey questionnaire was designed to find out the HR factors that affects the employee retention in the food and beverage industry in Qatar. The survey questionnaire is attached in the Appendix section. Going by the questions, it can be seen that, it had face validity as well as content validity as all the questions contained elements addressing HR practices and employee retention. The aspect of construct validity was examined by conducting a pilot study to check how far it was measuring the objective of the research.

Reliability is also a measure of quality of the instruments used for research. The results would only be considered valid when the measurement procedure is reliable (Heale and Twycross 2015). It primarily measures the consistency of data collected using the research instrument. Cronbach’s alpha is used to examine the reliability of the data. A score of 0.7 or more is considered as the acceptable score for reliability. In the given research also, the internal consistency of the data was measured by applying the reliability test. 

Data analysis techniques are of two types, qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative data analysis methods emphasize more on the words than on the numbers. This type of research is beneficial for getting a bigger and generalized picture and identifying the factors that have a scope for further research. Interpretation skill of the researchers is very significant in this type of study (Neuman 2013). On the other hand, quantitative data analysis techniques deal with the numbers and thus, apply the statistical methods for analysis of the numbers (Bryman and Bell 2015). This type of analysis technique or research method focuses on a specific issue and then draws inferences about the general picture. The researcher applied quantitative data analysis methods in this study. The survey responses were converted into numeric values as those were collected through replicable scale. This was done for the purpose of applying the scientific data analysis tools (Barua 2013). Inferential statistics was used for analyse the findings from the data. To test the research phenomenon, four research hypotheses were framed (Refer to Appendix). After the reliability test was conducted, multiple regression analysis was applied to test the hypothesis. Visual representation tools, like, charts, graphs, etc was used to present the survey responses. These are beneficial to highlight the pattern in the responses as well as to get an overall view of the perception of the participants regarding the factors affecting the research issue.

Sample Size and Sampling Technique

There are some ethical issues in the research studies that involve humans for data collection. These issues must be considered by the researchers while collecting primary data. Firstly, the legal, personal, and bureaucratic compliances must be met by the researcher. Informed consent should be taken from the participants and from the concerned organisation before proceeding with the data collection (McDaniel and Gates 2013). The researcher must explain the purpose of the study clearly and also the rules of participation. The participants should be informed that they can withdraw from the survey anytime. They should not be harmed, forced or bribed to answer the questions or manipulate the answers. However, if these are not followed, then there would be ethical issues. Secondly, the researcher must explain the confidentiality and anonymity agreement to the survey respondents. Moreover, it should be made clear that the data will be kept secret and to be used only for educational purposes. The researcher has followed all these ethical aspects before conducting the survey to avoid any type of ethical issues in future.

This chapter presented the methods followed to conduct the study on the impact of the HR practices on the employee retention with a special focus on the food and beverage industry. Descriptive research design has been followed for this study, which also adopted the survey research approach. As this research design is beneficial in gathering detailed information by observing the participants in natural environment, and collecting multifaceted data, it also has the risks of collecting incorrect data. However, for the ease of large amount of data collection, this approach was adopted. 200 employees’ information was collected from the database of two large organisations in the food and beverage industry in Qatar. From them, 53 employees were chosen through simple random sampling technique to conduct the survey. The survey questionnaire contained 14 close ended questions with a focus on the research topic. Validity and reliability test were also performed to check the accuracy of the research instrument. Lastly, mixed method, that is, both the qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis were applied to analyze the data. 

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