Lesson 6 focused on two potentially contentious, but very important, topics in business and management research: ethics and politics. The lesson considered ethics in terms of

• the obligations that influence them,
• ethical considerations for research participants (and others),
• the ethics of data analytics, and
• the specific types of ethical issues likely to arise in HR analytics.

Finally, the lesson discussed potential political influences on research projects.

You also further developed your understanding of hypothesis testing in Microsoft Excel and should now be able to determine whether to accept or reject research hypotheses, a key skill in quantitative research and data analytics.

The next lesson will explore two distinct topics. Firstly, it will consider the nature of quantitative research, specifically discussing

• the main steps in quantitative research,
• concepts and their measurement,
• reliability,
• validity, and
• critiques of quantitative research.

The second topic is sampling in quantitative research, which is important if you do not have the resources to access the entirety of the relevant population (e.g., all employees in a company), but still want to be able to reach robust conclusions about this population. The lesson will discuss

• the importance and relevance of sampling,
• sampling error,
• types of sampling (probability and non-probability), and
• sample size.

In terms of data analysis, you will be learning about

• one-sample t-tests,
• their purpose,
• when it’s appropriate to use them, and
• how to accept or reject hypotheses based on them.