An increasing number of Beedie instructors are incorporating case studies from Sage Business Cases (SBC) into their courses. With a diverse collection of 5500+ cases covering all aspects of business, SBC has a case to fit almost every classroom need. And I truly do mean diverse — Sage's cases are published by partners around the world, and Sage fills in gaps by commissioning cases on undertreated perspectives and issues.
Much of that should be old news to many Buzz readers, but it's good background for another aspect of Sage's diversity that I want to talk about today: diversity of case depth and form. At first glance, all cases sort of look the same: a statement about learning outcomes, several pages of narrative text with videos or data tables embedded where relevant, then some probing discussion questions. However, some of the case types within SBC take a different approach. Let me illustrate with two very different examples: Express Cases and Yale Raw Cases...
Creating a survey sounds super easy at first: you just pepper your respondent with questions about the things you want to know... Do you like my product/recycling/the colour blue?
Sadly, as with so many things in research, the simple approach is, well, overly simplistic. You need to be certain all of your questions are unambiguous — likely to be interpreted accurately and consistently each time and by each respondent — and that they yield exactly the information you need. Coming up with a well-formed question takes more time and expertise than you'd expect!
Wouldn't it be great if there was a source listing hundreds of questions that have been asked in prior academic marketing studies? One where you could look up a subject and find questions that have been used in studies published in top marketing journals. And, since we're dreaming, wouldn't it be even better if the description of each question included comments on its reliability and validity, details on earlier studies that used versions of the same question, and a citation for a recent article in which the question is mentioned?
Well, welcome to the SFU Library, where (some) dreams come true!
