these can provide thoughtful and insightful suggestions for university administra-
tors to optimize internal allocation of research resources and improve research
productivity.
2.6 Research Hypothesis and Methodology.....................
According to our literature review, wefind that there are only a few studies tar-
geting research efficiency and productivity of Chinese universities, most of which
are weak in methodology. Therefore, we take research production of 211Us to be
the research subject, and use some internationally and domestically popular
methods of efficiency and productivity evaluation such as DEA and Malmquist
index, to evaluate the efficiency status of 211Us during 2006–2010. Taking the
requirement of sample homogeneity of non-parametric model into consideration,
we divide the university research activities into two groups as Natural Sciences,
Engineering, Agriculture, and Medicine (NEAM) and Humanity and Social
Sciences (HSS), and evaluate them separately.
2.6.1 Research Hypotheses..............................
In this research, we collect input and output data of 211Us, and draw on relevant
theories of educational resource allocation and education input-output, and apply
DEA and DEA-based Malmquist index methods to form the major viewpoints and
conclusions. There are three basic hypotheses underpinning the design of the
research framework.
Hypothesis I: Homogeneity and independence of university’s research
activities
Homogeneity hypothesis suggests that research activities in universities have
similar structures (or the same type of input and output indicators), and share the
same or a similar goal or mission. Thus, our research focus is on evaluating the
efficiency of university research activity system with similar structure and mission,
3
taking for granted that the research efficiency difference driven by different
structures.
Independence hypothesis suggests that the research activities between univer-
sities are relatively independent, with no interactive effects between each other.
Although there are regular academic communications between universities, i.e.,
cooperative research, we still believe that this communication and cooperation of
(^3) There might be a concern on our focus on the research function. However, in fact, university is a
multi-product organization, our focus on research function would guarantee greater homogeneity
and thus robustness for the DEA results.
2.5 Comments on Empirical Literature and Quantitative Approach 27