Establishing rigor in mail-survey procedures in international business research

How rigorous have our data-collection procedures been in international business research? We report the results of a comprehensive content analysis of scholarly work published in four leading international business journals over the past decade. The focus is data-collection procedures used by researchers in mail surveys. The intent is to be self-critical and formulate strategies for enhancing the rigor and success of data-collection procedures in survey-based research. Our findings confirm that international business scholars could significantly improve surveys’ response rates by following more rigorous and well-established methodological practices already established in the social science literature. We also find that, while some continents tend to be oversampled, a large portion of the world remains underrepresented in international business research. The results point to interesting trends in cross-cultural data-collection procedures. Given that primary research will always drive new knowledge creation, scholars are strongly advised to practice best-available procedures for data collection.