ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to present the methodology of the conducted empirical research. In this chapter we formulate research objectives and questions, define the stages of the conducted research process, develop a catalogue of methods and tools used in the research process and describe the data sources used in the research process. The main objective of our research was to build a model for assessing risk management maturity that would be adapted to the specifics of crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to validate this model in enterprises from several different sectors and to establish a final diagnosis of how the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the level of risk management maturity in the enterprises under analysis. We tested our original model on a sample of 107 enterprises listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and representing three sectors: financial services (28), construction (38) and IT (41). We conducted the empirical research, using a triangulation of research methods. The main research methods, tools and approaches included the following: (1) the morphological analysis method (used to construct the authors’ original risk management maturity model adapted to the specifics of crisis situations), (2) exploratory research (used to develop a catalogue of the attributes of our model), (3) the adaptation approach to scale development in management research (used to develop the model’s scale for measuring risk management maturity), (4) the data-oriented validation approach, multiple case study, comparative analysis method and source documentation content analysis method (applied in the model validation procedure), (5) the qualitative data analysis using coding (used in identifying the changes that occurred in the risk management maturity of the examined enterprises in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic).
