Methodology and Operationalisation

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on the research strategies, designs and methods applied in this study focusing on higher education with respect to national/federal quality assurance systems. In the previous chapters the requirements for the different transformation processes and quality assurance mechanisms were described to characterise the current situation. Now a research design has to be operationalised to work out concrete answers to the main research question and the sub-questions. Therefore, an overview of the research design including the research instruments (chapter 3) used for gathering the data for this study is given. This part of the book ends with a description of the different methods used for analysing the data.