An Analysis Of Research Methods For Construction Management

The choice of appropriate methods is an important step in the research process, there have been intensive discussions about the theory and methods adopted in construction management research. Such discussions made a good inspiration on the topic selection of this dissertation. Based on a broad literature review and a classification framework of research contents and methods, this dissertation did an impressive series of content analyses of 2375 papers between 2000 and 2009 from four international top construction management journals including Construction Management and Economics, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Engineering Construction and Architectural Management, Journal of Management in Engineering. The objective was attempted to find the answer for the question"what kind of research method should be adopted for the study of selected research content"by a positive approach.The total proportion along 10 years, the annual trend and the proportion comparison of the first and second 5 years of each content (9 categories) and method (5 categories) were presented through temporal analysis. Then the correlation between research contents and methods was studied through Cross-classification Analysis. The chi-square test proved that there was a good correlation between these two classifacations. The proportion distribution of research methods adopted in each content were calculated. Further, the relative preferences of research contents to different methods were also provided by comparing the difference between this proportion and the total proportion of each method. Statistical results also showed that there were some preferences on the research contents and methods in these four journals. Theoretical analysis was also used to explain the causation of all above phenomena and trends.At the end of the article, two case studies were adopted to analyse the selection and application process of the research methods.