Q. How do find a positivistic or an interpretive research article?

These steps should help you find what you are looking for –

a).  Head to the library’s menu of databases for business & management - http://libguides.css.edu/az.php?s=12363

b).  Log-on to Business Source Ultimate.

c). Underneath the search box is a link for advanced search. Click on it to toggle to the advanced search screen.

d).  Before you can limit your search results to the type of article you want (positivistic & interpretive) you need to search on a topic, we’ll say for example’s sake “leadership.”

e). From your search results screen, in the left-hand column there are options for limiting. Choose “Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.

f). Now things get a bit trickier. Management is not like the sciences which often have an additional limiter for the type of research article. Also, the terms your professor is using are different from what, in my role as a librarian, than what I am used to, and what are often used in the databases.

I think this is what you might want to search for –

Positivistic: use quantitative

Interpretive: use qualitative

You will now need to do two separate searches, one for each type of article.

Up at the top of the screen, the first search box should still have your search of leadership listed.

Now, below that, type: quantitative

Hit the search button.

When you browse the results, on the right side of each record is an icon for a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass over it. Click on this and it will bring up the abstract. The abstract should be the “smoking gun” to describe the article as a work of quantitative research.

Once you have found your “Positivistic” article, head back up to the search boxes, delete quantitative, replace it with qualitative, and hit the search button again.

And now you are back to browsing the abstracts to select an interpretive article.