Category Archives: Thesis

Data analysis – is hard

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I’ve had to stop writing my thesis for the time being, I’ve come to the end of the first draft of the literature review but I have been told by my supervisor to concentrate on the data analysis otherwise I’m going to run out of time. I was going to start with In Vivo coding but this felt too loose and unstructured. I prefer to use more structured methods. So, I’ve gone back to basics and reviewed some of the literature on qualitative data analysis.

I’ve been reading The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Jonny Saldana and Qualitative Data Analysis by Miles and Huberman and have decided to avoid In Vivo coding and start again by creating a conceptual framework based on research questions, hypothesis, problem areas, and / or key variables that the researcher brings to the study

I’m going to create a set of codes based on:

Bogden and Biklen’s (1992) coding accounting scheme.

  1. Settings/Context: general information on surroundings that allows you to put the study in a larger context.
  2. Definition of the situation: how people understand, define, or perceive the setting or the topics on which the study bears.
  3. Perspectives: ways of thinking about their setting shared by informants (“how things are done here”).
  4. Ways of thinking about people and objects: understandings of each other, of outsiders, of objects in their world (more detailed than above).
  5. Process: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  6. Activities: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  7. Events: specific activities, especially ones occurring infrequently.
  8. Strategies: ways of accomplishing things; people’s tactics, methods, techniques for meeting their needs.
  9. Relationships and social structure: unofficially defined patterns such as cliques, coalitions, romances, friendships and betrayals.
  10. Methods: problems, joys, dilemmas of the research process – often in relation to comments by observers.

Libraries and customer service

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It has become clear after extensively reviewing the literature on customer services in the Higher Education sector that student services have been slow to the party when it comes to changing processes and services to reflect changing student expectations.

I have found that the university library sector has been ahead of the game for years and there is a significant amount of published research, case studies and articles outlining what has been achieved over the past twenty to twenty five years.

Libraries have really followed on from IT Help Desk systems where staff in organizations became connected to networked Help systems. These allowed staff to place a ‘ticket’ that specified an issue or system failure. The response would likely be someone visiting the staff or a fix via network tools.

Over time the IT Help Desk was reconfigured into a Service Desk where service staff were able to provide more customer focused services not just system fixes. Service Desk staff were eventually able to provide training and other support.

These Service Desk and Help Desk systems have now been introduced into university student service desks and allow students to access 24 hour self service and receive streamlined services.

The issue for where I am carrying out my research project is the SID system (Student Information Desk) combined with a new physical student HUB has significantly changed the working practices of the Faculty support teams. The main impact has been a reduction in student foot-fall and fewer students coming in person.

This has had considerable impact on the Faculty teams in terms of how they now perceive their roles, the SID system has in fact imposed an alternative identity on teams and individuals. The system has demanded that the staff undertake additional training and changes to work process flows. Students are now more likely to go to the student HUB and issues are posted on the SID system where Faculty interventions are needed.

The system has changed the relationship between the staff and students and what were front line staff have now become back-office staff. These issues have generated a mass of data for my research project.

Reflections on the interviews

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Convergent interviewing as a process is very effective for getting participants to provide a lot of detailed information in a reasonably short period of time. In my experience the participants found the process interesting because the majority of them thought that they would be asked a series of structured questions and when I told them that I only had one main question they found this slightly perplexing.

For the majority of cases the participants did not find it difficult staying on  topic or talking for long periods of time without prompting. There was no issue with any participant about the recording of the interviews. Everyone was happy to sign off on the confidentiality form.

All of the interviews lasted a minimum of 50 minutes and it would have been possible to have continued with the interviews for longer in some cases.

The interviews needed a lot of pre-planning, listening to the last recording, designing the next question, preparing the location, contacting the next candidate to confirm that they are happy to participate. I arranged for each participant to select the location, the date and time.

The snowballing technique worked well. Every participant was able to provide the details of someone who would be useful for me to speak to next or at some point in future. I also put together a list of possible participants.

At the start of the process I intended sticking as closely as possible to the way that Dick had described but I found out quite quickly that I had to compromise the approach. I had intended putting together a reference group, as described by Dick and did recruit a small representative group who agreed to work with me. Very quickly I encountered a problem, the reference group could not agree when to meet as a group mainly due to time constraints and work responsibilities.

Eventually I realised that I needed to get on with the interviews as time was running out. I spoke to each of the people in the representative group and asked them to recommend a group of participants individually rather than meeting as a group. In the end the compromise worked well.

As the interview process has carried on I have not referred to the reference group. I have interviewed three members of the reference group because they line manage several of the subsequent interviewees.

The main thing that has worked is the open-ended unstructured interview and the note taking during the interviews. I have not compromised the process that much only in so far as it makes practical sense. So far the experience of convergent interviewing has confirmed to me the usefulness of semi-or unstructured questions for eliciting answers that are broad based but also contain enough specificity to get enough data to make the outputs useful.

First draft

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I have decided to look at some published / online PhD thesis papers in order to see how they are structured. I have downloaded a few Thesis that use Actor-Network Theory.

I have been reading the structure of the thesis entitled Auditing in Electronic Environments from an Actor-Network Theory Perspective: Case of Egypt by Manal Nour El Din El Safty of the  Helwan University, Egypt. The thesis provides a good structure model for my thesis and provides a reasonable guide on a structure for writing about ANT.

The thesis also gives  a good structure for the literature review and how to organize the research  strategy, design, philosophical underpinning and the research methodology.

Another paper The use of Actor-Network Theory and a Practice-Based Approach to understand online community participation by Gibrán Rivera González of the University of Sheffield is another good example of the structure of an ANT thesis.

I have created a draft template for my thesis and am continuing to read for the literature review.

 

Starting to draft my thesis

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It’s time to start drafting my thesis. I have decided to start with the literature review and to focus on developing a review of the history of change theories  in organisations. The reason for this is that my research is focused on the process of change and the impact of change on the identity of teams. It is important to understand where and why change theories came about and how these relate to the research component of the project. Also Actor-Network Theory is centred on change in terms of networks and their associations and how these come into being, stabilise, become durable or destabilise and fall apart.

The main aspect of the project is centred on the restructuring of the faculty administration teams and this is based in some core change theory.

Additional interview

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After completing the interviews I decided to review the outputs to date and decided that it is necessary to add an additional interview but with much more detailed questions. The reason for this is that there is a need for some more in depth data regarding the use of the SID system by a key user and manager of the system.

I decided to ask the assistant Registry manager a series of carefully refined questions. The questions stemmed directly from previous participant answers and followed the Convergent Interviewing practice of reviewing the output of a series of questions and answers and then generating additional questions.

From the first question set I drafted a further five questions each with a few supplemental questions. The final question set contained 29 questions so the process moved from being semi-structured to structured.

The aim of the final question set was to allow for the participant to provide some very specific answers regarding the system in use.

 

 

Last interview

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I carried out my last interview on the 3 July. The interviewee was the Academic Services manager who talked about the SID system and the new student HUB that will be opening in September.

The interview was interesting because it was a summary of the situation now and acts as an end point to the start of the interview process that looked back to times before the current organisation structure, over a period of about thirteen years.

The early interviews described long periods of pre-tchnology use where staff self identified as ‘paper pushers’ up to the present day where staff now self identify as having expertise and knowledge that is valuable to academic staff and students.

The next steps will be to tie all the interview strands together and create a chronology of actions or a set of chronotopes.

 

 

Continuing with the interviews

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I have been working on completing the research interviews. My supervisor is concerned that I do not carry on interviewing too many people due to the time that it will take to do the analaysis. The problem is the more people I interview the more interesting the project becomes and the more I want to carry on with the interviews.

In some respects this issue is at the core of the research process, how much data is enough. With the interviews I am getting to the point where saturation has been reached.

In order to provide as comprehensive overview as possible I am planning to carry out a couple of observations of meetings and some observations of staff using the SID system. I have also managed to gather a large number of documents that describe the SID development process, implementation and a series of emails regarding the use of the system by staff.

Considering the thesis

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I have been considering the drafting of the thesis. Once the interviews have been concluded I will start to consider the data analysis. The process of data analysis will need to be carfully planned prior to actually carrying out the analysis. The analysis will need to be aligned with the research plan and  strategy. Using convergent interviewing lends itself to the use of Nvivo for coding.

Before the analysis or at least simultaneously I will be starting to draft the thesis. I am aiming to start with the literature review which will be a significant historical overview of organisational change management and Actor-Network Theory.

I will return to these topics in later posts.