Research Methods in the itAIS Community: Building a Classification Framework for Management and Information Systems Studies

In this paper, we present a framework for the systematic classification of management research methods. We propose a scalable model based on six classification criteria: Type of Contribution (e.g. theory testing, context-specific description, etc.); Research Paradigm (e.g. positivist, interpretivist, etc.); Research Design (e.g. case study, survey, etc.); Time and Distance Lag Strategies (e.g. longitudinal, cross-cultural, etc.); Information Elaboration Methods (e.g. statistical analysis, text analysis, etc.); and Information Gathering and Preparation Methods (e.g. interviews, secondary data collection, etc.). We suggest that the six-level framework we present here has the potential to allow the systematic and granular monitoring of methodological trends in scholarly communities. In the final part of the paper, the framework is utilized to classify the 62 papers of the itAIS 2011 selected papers collection, and the methodological attitudes of the itAIS community are briefly commented.