module 8

Question 1

Internal archival data

Answer 1

Data that are generated within the company that conducts the research

E.g. A researcher employed by unilever would like to understand to what extend Unilevers advertising expenditures for their brands are related to brand sales. To answer this question, you use unilevers sales and advertising data for 400+ brands - data that are available within the company

Question 2

External archival data

Answer 2

Data that are generated by sources outside a company, and that are not exclusively available to the company but can be used by anyone. Some archival data are publicly available. This means that they are available for free for the entire world to use. Other archival data are commercially available. This means thaat one has to pay to use them

Question 3

Publicly available data:

Answer 3

Government publications

World bank (world development indicators)

OECD

Annual reports

Question 4

Commercially available data sets:

Answer 4

Compustat, ORBIS (databases with accounting data)

Datastream (stock price data)

SDC (alliance data)

Execucomp (CEO data, incl. executive compensation)

Nielsen data (consumer and retailer panel data)

Question 5

When is archival research a suitable research strategy

Answer 5

1) When you want to learn from past successes/failures in the industry

2) When you want to know whether/how an effect changes over time

3) When you want to know whether/how an effect is different across countries

4)When you want to examine socially sensitive phenomena unobtrusively

Question 6

strenght 1: archival research

Answer 6

Tapping into industry wisdom:

Learn from past successes and failures in the industry when you cannot rely on your own experience

Question 7

Strength 2 archival research

Answer 7

Examining effects across time

Examine whether an effect (IV –> DV) changes over time

Question 8

strength 3 archival data

Answer 8

Examining effects across countries

Examine whether an effect (IV –> DV) is different across countries

Question 9

strength 4 archival research

Answer 9

Examining socially-sensitive phenomena

Examine socially-sensitive phenomena unobtrusively, without collecting data directly from evaluees.

Minimizes the opportunity of distored responses

Question 10

Piecing together archival data

Answer 10

Often you need to piece together multiple archival data sets into one new data set that you can subsequently use to address your research questions

Question 11

What is important when pieceing together archival data

Answer 11

Your unit of analysis has to correspond

Unlike other dat sources, archival data can be (and typically are ) collected over time. The data are longitudinal (rather than cross-sectional, which means at one point in time) in nature. This makes them ideal if the nature of your research is to examine changes over time

Question 12

Three sources of measurement unreliability may lague any type of research, but are particularly common in archival research. These are:

Answer 12

1) missing data
2) inaccurately recorded data
3) Fake data

Question 13

Missing data in cross-sectional data sets

Solutions:

Answer 13

Listwise deletion: delete if there is missing info

BUT: check user manual! if missing = close to 0 then recode missing to 0

Mean substitution:
Replace missing value for observations I and variable with average value on variable J for all other observations

Question 14

Missing data in longitudinal data sets
Solutions

Answer 14

Interpolation

E.g. average of year before and year after

Question 15

Inaccurately recorded data

Solutions

Answer 15

Inaccuracies that turn up as extreme data points (outliers)

Inaccuracies that are not extreme

Solution: Remove observation: run analyses with and without observation

Trim/truncate (in large data sets)
Remove a fraction of observations
e.g. 1% most extreme observations

Question 16

Fake observations Solutions

Answer 16

Be critical :

Where? when? why?

Question 17

Composite measures

Answer 17

Many of the measures used in archival research are single-item measures that capture very concrete constructs. Think of measures such as stock returns, shareholder value, firm profitability, sales, or R&D expenditures.

However in a few instances multi-item measures can be desirable in an archival research study. This is the case when you need to measure a less concrete construct for which multiple potential measures exist.

For example, suppose you would like to investigate if firms become more profitable when they grow larger. How are going to measure the variable firm size? Multiple potential measures exist (and all of them have been used in prior research):

The firm’s sales (larger firms have more sales)
The firm’s number of employees (larger firms employ more people)
The market value of the firm (larger firms have a higher market value)

Which one of these three measures will you use to measure the variable firm size? If there is no good reason why one measure would be better than another, you can of course arbitrarily pick one of the three measures and continue with your research. Alternatively, you can create a composite measure that combines all three measures, provided that the three measures have a high Cronbach’s alpha (that is, they should be interrelated as you consider them to be indicators of the same underlying construct).

Question 18

Combining multiple archival indicators into a single measure

Answer 18

1) standardize each indicator
2) average the standardized indicators

Question 19

Measurement validity

Answer 19

Pertains to whether your measurement instruments capture what they are supposed to measure.

Considerable conceptual overlap: valid measure

Little conceptual overlap: questionable proxy

Question 20

Questionable proxy example:

Answer 20

Construct: Firm innovativeness

measure: R&D spending

Imput doesnt mean results, you can spend a lot of money on R&D and not be innovative

Good measure would be output of new products

Question 21

How to validate that an archival measure is a good measure rather than a bad proxy

Answer 21

Provide precedence, but

Provide sound logic to support that considerable conceptual overlap exists between construct and measure

Show that there is a substantial correlation between your proxy and a valid survey measure for a small subsample of data

Question 22

How to validate that an archival measure is a good measure rather than a bad prody? (cont’d)

Answer 22

Provide evidence of substancial correlations (r>.3) with related constructs (nomological validity)

Question 23

Internal validity

Answer 23

Internal validity is the extent to which a sstudy can rule out alternative explanations. To establish a valid relationship between variables, a researcher needs to limit the influence of extraneous/confounding variables. The less change there is for confounding in a study, the higher the internal validity, and the more confident you can be in the studys findings

Question 24

How can you improve the internal validity of archival research

Answer 24

By including control variables in your analysis

by including control variables you can filter out or isolate the control variables effects from the relationship between the variables of interest

Question 25

External validity (generalizability)

Answer 25

always read the documents explaining the methodology behind archival database