Reflective report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Reflective report - Essay Example For the purpose of research, I have selected six banks, three from traditional banking sectors based in the United Kingdom (UK) and three from Islamic banking sector (Hennink, Hutter and Bailey, 2010; Wolters, 2013). I have selected performance of the banks from two different periods, that is, the pre-financial crisis era between 2005 and 2007 and post-financial crisis era between 2008 and 2012. The reason behind selection of these two periods is that it justifies the earlier studies by a number of authors that has been mentioned in the literature review. To analyze and compare the performance of the banks I have calculated financial ratios so that financial performance of the banks can be compared. The main purpose of conducting ratio analysis was to analyse the capital adequacy and profitability of the banks in context of different countries. Financial ratios were considered appropriate because these are standard measures and can be compared easily. Furthermore, to examine the position of Islamic banks with respect to that of the UK, hypothesis was tested using T-test. In the hypothesis testing, performance of Islamic banks was better that that of conventional banks was considered as the null hypothesis (Alexander, 2001). Sampling is an important part of any realistic research and there is a number of sampling methods that can be implemented in a research. However in my paper, I have implemented purposive sampling so that within a convenient sample size, appropriate research can be conducted. Purposive sampling is important from the context of this research because under this approach, the samples are selected based on certain specific characteristics that represent the population. Since the analysis was conducted based on financial data of banks, I did not conduct any primary research. Instead, the numerical figures were collected from annual reports of banks and information regarding the literature review was gathered from