STEP TWO

Critically evaluate the main journal article and its component parts

Before you can set the research strategy (i.e., STAGE SIX) that you will use to carry out your research, you need to have a very detailed understanding of the main journal article that you are duplicating (i.e., Route A: Duplication), making generalisations from (i.e., Route B: Generalisation), or extending in some way (i.e., Route C: Extension). This is particularly necessary because of the importance of the main journal article when carrying out a Route #1: Replication-based dissertation. Clearly, you will have read the main journal article a number of times by this stage, and have spoken to your supervisor about the route you plan to take, and the approach within that route, but you may not have attained a really detailed understanding of your main journal article. This is important for a number of reasons:

• The main journal article that you are interested in is at the core of a Route #1: Replication-based dissertation, so you cannot carry out this type of dissertation effectively without having detail knowledge of all of the component parts of the journal article you are duplicating, making generalisations from, or extending.

• Irrespective of the route you are following (i.e., Route A: Duplication, Route B: Generalisation or Route C: Extension), you will need to critically analyse your main journal article in order to (a) find potential strengths and weaknesses, and (b) have sufficient knowledge to clearly justify the choice of route and the approach within that route (e.g., a population-based generalisation within Route B: Generalisation). You can't just take the main journal article at face value.

Critically evaluating the main journal article and its component parts can be achieved by working through four steps: (a) understanding the main theoretical components of your main journal article; (b) identifying those limitations that the main journal article's authors have highlighted; (c) assessing what criticism and support the main journal article has received in the literature; and (d) identifying those factors that you consider to be the limitations of the main journal article.

STEP A
Understand the main theoretical components of your dissertation

Since you are taking on a Route #1: Replication-based dissertation, you will heavily rely on the main theoretical components that make up the Literature Review section of your main journal article. Just remember that it is less common for journal articles to call this section, Literature Review, but instead may use headings that refer to particular theories or constructs that are being investigated. The goal of this step, STEP A, is to understand these theoretical components so that you can either duplicate them, make some adjustments or additions in order to generalise from them, or to extend them by adding new theories or constructs. By theoretical components, we mean those components that we discussed were important in STEP ONE above when you analysed the broader literature using review articles. These components include: (a) the constructs discussed in the main journal article, including any definitions used, the perspectives adopted towards such constructs, as well as their dimensions; (b) the relationships and boundaries between such constructs, which may be set out in a theoretical model; and (c) any discussion on how these constructs were measured.

In addition to simply reading these components of the Literature Review section of the main journal article, you can also (a) use the review articles to learn about them in more depth, as well as (b) read the sources set out in the reference list of the main journal article. When looking at the review articles and the sources in the reference list, determine whether any of the same sources were used. For example, if the construct, customer loyalty, was discussed in the main journal article and review article, were any of the sources used the same? If they were, what did the review article have to say about the sources from the main journal article? For example, did the review article criticise those sources quoted in the main journal article (e.g., stating that the definition used for customer loyalty was too broad or narrow, or that the construct had been measured in an outdated way, or had been discredited, etc.). To get a complete understanding of the main theoretical components in your dissertation, you need to understand those theoretical components used in the main journal article in as much detail as possible.

STEP B
Identify those limitations that the main journal article's authors have highlighted

In any quality journal article, the authors will have identified and discussed potential limitations to their own research. There are some limitations that the authors of your main journal article will (a) have been able to anticipate before they carried out their research, and those that (b) became evident during the research process. Let's look at each of these scenarios in turn:

• Limitations that may be anticipated BEFORE the research was carried out

  There are many instances where it will not have been possible for the authors to avoid potential limitations to their research, even when they were able to anticipate such limitations before the research process started. After all, there are many ideals in research, such as using a probability sampling technique when following a quantitative research design, but factors such as availability, time and money mean that you will often have to settle for something that is not the ideal, such as a non-probability sampling technique. Rather than these research limitations becoming a big problem, you can usually simply acknowledge what the problems were, explain why they were problems, and justify the choices that were made. For example, the authors of your main journal article may have acknowledged that their preferred sampling strategy was to use a probability sampling technique, but since there was no list of the population they wanted to study, without which it is impossible to use a probability sampling technique, they chose the best alternative, perhaps a quota sample.

  Under normal circumstances, you should expect the authors to discuss potential research limitations that could have been anticipated in the relevant section of their journal articles. Taking the example above, they would have likely acknowledged such a potential limitation in the Sampling section of their journal article (i.e., part of their Research Strategy section, or whatever they have called this section; sometimes Methodology or Research Methods).

• Limitations that become evident DURING the research process

  Some research limitations are very difficult to anticipate before they occur. The main reason for this is that there can be problems with the data that was collected (e.g., missing data) or the findings, which only become evident after the fact. Sometimes these are problems of research quality that the authors were unable to anticipate (i.e., problems of reliability, or internal and external validity). In other cases, they may be theoretical and conceptual problems that were highlighted by their findings.

  Since these research limitations are often identified during the research process or once the data has been collected, these are most often acknowledged and explained in the Research Limitations section of the Discussion or Conclusion sections of the main journal article, although the section is only infrequently entitled, Research Limitations.

You need to work through the various sections of the main journal article and identify all those research limitations highlighted by the authors. Both research limitations that could have been anticipated before the research was carried out, as well as those that became evident during the research process are useful when it comes to providing justifications for your chosen route and the approach within that route.