Research Design

This chapter outlines and discusses the research strategy underlying this study. First, critical realism is introduced and put forward as the central epistemological and ontological stance of this study. Subsequently, this study’s sequential mixed-methods research strategy is delineated from traditional positivist quantitative and interpretive qualitative approaches. This strategy encompasses a sequence of research activities ranging from an initial exploration followed by four in-depth case studies in ISD teams to a questionnaire-based survey of more than 600 participants. In their sequence, these distinct activities mesh to provide answers to this study’s research questions: (1) the phase of initial exploration first serves to elicit the functional affordances of collaborative quality assurance techniques. It shows that there is a bounded set of functional affordances of these techniques, but not all teams perceive the same subset of affordances. In fact, this phase finds hints toward the influence of team cognition on the perception of functional affordances of collaborative quality assurance techniques in teams. (2) The phase of in-depth case studies serves to provide an explanation why teams differ in the subsets of affordances they perceive. It finds that their transactive memory restricts them in the application of collaborative quality assurance techniques. Moreover, this phase serves to find and explain the emergent effects of collaborative quality assurance techniques on a team’s transactive memory. (3) The questionnaire-based survey serves to corroborate this explanation and tests the economically relevant consequences implied by the explanation. In the following, the single research steps are discussed with respect to their internal consistency, rigor, and validity. Lastly, this section also examines the validity of the integrated research design.