For example, the summary of research as below:-
1) Title: Factors of Internal Audit Effectiveness
2) DV: Internal Audit Effectiveness
3) IV: i) Risk management, ii) Effective internal control system, iii) Audit experience, iv) Cooperation between internal and external auditor, v) Performance measurement
I manage to state one Research Question and few Objectives (main and sub) as below:
Research Question: What are the factors of internal audit effectiveness?
Objectives:
Main objective
· To identify the factors of internal audit effectiveness
The sub-objectives
i) To ascertain the relationship between risk management and internal audit effectiveness.
ii) To examine the relationship between effective internal control system and internal audit effectiveness.
iii) To identify the relationship between audit experience and internal audit effectiveness.
iv) To identify the relationship between cooperation between internal and external auditor and internal audit effectiveness.
v) To investigate the relationship between performance measurement and internal audit effectiveness.
Is it the correct / appropriate way to state the Research Question and Objectives as above? Or should I state Sub-questions according to the sub-objectives as well?
Please comment. Thanks.
I think the following paper would help you in this regard:
Research questions, hypotheses and objectives
P Farrugia, BA Petrisor, F Farrokhyar… - Canadian Journal of …, 2010 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
What I don't like about how you have framed the question and sub-questions is that you appear to have pre-identified the causal factors. If your research question is as you have stated it:
"What are the factors of internal audit effectiveness?"
... then you should not proceed to identify what factors you are going to analyse as there may be others not on your list. A methodology that is open to the unknown would be more appropriate. That means your sub-questions would be more exploratory.
Hello, I think your questions are relevant.
In a search for causal links, it is enough for the research question to be transformed into a hypothesis of research or goal of reversible research according to Pooper; The rebuttability of the hypothesis is its ability to be tested by different methods. Your questions are relevant because:
These are research questions, "belong to the conceptual world" because:
they relate theoretical concepts (audit experience, cooperation) and not variables
The concepts they relate to are measurable (audit experience, cooperation) by variables (number of years of experience of the auditor, number of meetings between auditors and audited)
The questions are formulated in such a way that the link to be tested is clear and that even the test tool to be used is apparent: (identify the link between)
I have some remarks: when you say: identify the link between two variables you understand that the meaning of the causality and the nature of the link (positive negative linear nonlinear, etc.) is not known. In your case, to identify the link between the cooperation between auditors and the effectiveness of internal audit means that both the cooperation influences the effectiveness of the audit and the effectiveness of the audit influences the cooperation. The test tool in this case must be sophisticated enough to test this link (equation system, recursive causality).
Effectiveness of the internal audit is a multidimensional construct, its operationalization therefore requires tools of test of tyle: models of measurement formative or reflexive
I prefer that the objectives be transformed into sub-questions so that you can formulate hypotheses deduced from theories (theory of the agency, transaction costs, incomplete contracts, external contingency, resources, structural holes, etc. ) to answer it before doing data analysis
To formulate the causal relationship, we should use key words.
For example the term "impact" expresses a causal relationship:
e.g. : What is the "impact" of governance on performance:
When we say, we study the association between gouvernance and performance, it is not a causal relationship.
Hello,
The subject of your research is quite interesting, and from the details you have provided it could be deduced that you want to investigate factors that influences internal audit effectiveness. If this is so, then the title of your study could be rephrased to read as follows:
"An Investigation of Factors Influencing Internal Audit Effectiveness"
...then you proceed on an exploratory study to identify those factors.
Else, if you have already identified some factors (organisational or environmental) that you need to examine their impact on internal audit effectiveness, then you title read thus:
"Impact of Organisational (or environmental) Factors on Internal Audit Effectiveness"
...then you can go ahead to draw hypotheses to test the relationship between the various factor (IVs) and internal audit effectiveness (DV), which would much in line with what you have started. For example:
Hypothesis 1(null): There is no relationship between risk management and internal audit effectiveness.
I hope you find this useful...
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