The troublesome triplets: issues in teaching reliability, validity and generalisation to business students

Abstract

This discussion paper focuses on the problem of how to approach teaching abstract concepts to business and management students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Students are faced with the problem of how to identify and assess the rigour of what they read, how to generalise from the results of their research and how to judge the extent to which this can be done. Students struggle with how to operationalise these abstract concepts and develop a critical thinking stance. An overview of how the leading business textbook authors describe reliability, validity and generalisation is given, categorised into four areas: the positivist, phenomenological, embedded and skills views. Some of the confusion that exists in the literature is identified. Following this, the paper outlines three approaches to teaching students how to recognise the key issues surrounding validity and reliability and how to make generalisations based on ongoing action research.