Category Archives: Qualitative Research Diary

Adjusting my data analysis strategy

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I have been reviewing and rethinking my data analysis approach. I have been coding in NVivo directly to the audio track. This has been revealing in terms of coding and memo writing but is extremely time consuming. After thinking through the process from my original strategy of using Convergent Interviewing and keeping short notes rather than transcribing the whole interview, I realised that I need to revisit this and code against my typed notes rather than the whole audio track.

According to Dick the original Convergent Interviewing process relied on note taking without transcription where the notes are linked to the under pinning theoretical framework.

I am now going to:

  1. code in NVivo against the notes I took during and after the interviews
  2. review the contract summary forms to determine themes
  3. query the codes and memos from the text coding and memo writing
  4. combine with coding from the interview recordings

This will return me to my original plan and speed up the data analysis process.

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

Towards the end of the interview process

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I have to date interviewed 12 participants. I have decided to carry out five more interviews. These will be:

  1. The Director of Student Services
  2. The Registrar
  3. A user from the Distance Learning team
  4. A project manager who carried out a quantitative survey gathering data and feedback on the SID system post implementation
  5. The Director of the School

Completing these interviews will combined with the already completed interviews, provide me with a good cross section of staff and a rich base of data covering organizational and technological change.

So far I have carried out some initial data analysis using In Vivo and Descriptive coding. I will be revisiting all the coding again. I have been reading Johnny Saldana’s book The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers and Kathy Charmaz book Constructing Grounded Theory.

I have so far found the coding process very difficult. The volume of data can be overwhelming but the main problems I’m facing are thinking through the codes so that they make sense in terms of the research questions, having the confidence to code and to know that the coding is adequate.

In Vivo coding seems time consuming and using the words of the participants sometimes feels as though the coding is insubstantial, the descriptive coding also seems too abstract and not representative of what is being said or analytical enough.

Dealing with the number of codes used feels overwhelming and difficult to organise. I have been using post-it notes for the descriptive coding so far to avoid leaping to the use of computer data analysis first off Once I have had a couple of rounds of hand coding I will look at the data using NVivo.

Hopefully the NVivo coding after hand coding will be faster and will get to a set of conclusions quickly.

 

 

 

The fifth interview

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The fifth interview was very interesting. The participant was a team member with a very different perspective on the question.

The participant currently works in a customer facing role and has had a lot of student interaction. This has changed though over the past three to four years as a result of the introduction of technologies particularly web based services that allow students to upload their work electronically which previously had to be submitted on paper. The paper had to be processed, catalogued passed on to markers, returned to the administration team and returned to students.

This process was very labour intensive and made the participant feel underappreciated especially when it came to how they felt they were viewed by other staff – particuallary academic staff.

The impact of technology on the team has been to free up time for the participant to spend more time with students and they felt that this allowed them to provide a much better and more personalised service than before,

The number of students coming in person has significantly reduced and this has meant that those coming in have more complex issues to deal with. This has allowed the participant to develop better customer service skills. The participant mentioned that they felt that the team had developed a better skill set and was more appreciated by academic staff as a group that had real expertise – rather than just being paper pushers.

The participant said that the SID system is a success but it is early days and there is a need to constantly reinforce the message – with staff and students – that it should be used.

This was a very interesting interview because the participant is a direct user of the SID system and had some useful insights. Once again I felt the interview went well and there were some very useful convergent points raised.

The fourth interview

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The fourth interview was with a person was quite different from the three earlier ones. The main difference was the three earlier interviews were with managers the fourth was with a team member who had quite a different perspective on the question.

The interviewee was much more focused on operational issues and talked about team structure issues. The issue of staff changes was raised and how these have had an impact on the team and its work. The participant mentioned that over the years the institution has discussed many organizational level changes but many have not been implemented and many others have been only partially implemented.

On one occasion a merger between two teams was stopped due to teams objecting to job changes and the need to develop common practices. This resulted in some conflicts developing due to a lack of openness to new ways of working.

Over time jobs have changed though mainly due to the impact of new technologies being introduced. Technologies that have reduced the need to handle paper. The technologies have increased the skill level of the team and this has in turn built the confidence level of team members who now have more time to provide better customer support.

The use of the student information desk (networked communication system) was raised and the difficulty of building a supportive network of users and how difficult it is to get user buy in. It is felt by the participant that the SID system creates an impersonal service – unlike direct email communication – even though the SID system is seen as a better system than email.

I found that this interview worked well probably because I’ve done a few now and am getting more confident about the process. The data collected is becoming very relevant to the project and ties in very well with relevant theories.

The third interview

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I carried out the third interview yesterday afternoon. The participant talked about changes to the team that they manage and who the changed have occurred over the past five years. Changes include changes to the structure of the team, staff leaving and being replaced and the introduction of technology.

The participant was not sure at the beginning of the interview where to start. The participant decided to start with the question “Who is my team?”. This was a great starting point for an answer about identity and multiple identities.

The participant mentioned that they are a member of four teams each of which has a different identity. The issue of working practices and the variety of technologies entering the team were mentioned.

Issues of structure change at team, department and institutional levels were mentioned. Work complexity was mentioned as an influence on the team and how the team functions.

The introduction of the student information desk was raised as an issue for team members and the different ways that staff members have responded to the system i.e. some consider it to be the enemy and others a member of the team. The view that technology has increased workloads rather than reducing it.

The participant mentioned that staff tended to be more open to adopting new technology and innovations if the new technology replaced a manual system or was clearly an improvement otherwise staff would be inclined to see the technology as a problem or be seen by those introducing the technology as blockers or resistors.

The participant mentioned that there needs to be a fit between the technology, the team and the organisation in order for it to be accepted. The need for a technology champion was mentioned as a way of helping the team adopt the technology.

After the interview I reaslied that there is a need to expand the interview scope from the four originally selected teams to include the IT manager who was responsible for the implementation of the student information desk.

Looking at the project through an ANT lens I need to start ‘following the Actors’ a bit more closely. I will be speaking to the IT team manager in the next few weeks, tracing the documentation around the initial idea for the information desk and how the system was translated from the initial idea into the actual application.

I want to investigate how the decision making process and internal relationships influenced the procurement, the project design, planning, training and implementation. I also want to investigate whether the information desk was seen as being aligned with the interests of team members who would be using the system.

The second interview

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The second went a little better than the first. The main difference between the first and the second is I was a better prepared. I amended some of the documentation after comments from the first interview. For example the first participant didn’t want to sign the Participant Consent form because there was a section for a witness to sign. The participant commented that the interview couldn’t be confidential if the form was witnessed.

I have now removed the witness signature. The second participant was happy to sign the form and the interview started. I repeated the same procedure as the first interview, leaving the question on the table in front of the participant.

Another change I made was I made use of the Sonocent text blocking function. This worked really well in allowing me to write text notes against the recorded voice.

The interview lasted about 50 minutes. The participant was happy to speak openly about the team and covered all the points I needed. I have found interviewing to be quite tiring. The need to listen carefully and manage the recordings and type notes is quite strenuous.

I have found that the participants enjoy the experience of being interviewed and it’s interesting how much information people will provide when asking just one question. This seems to create a space where people feel they can open up freely.

The first interview

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I finally managed to carry out my first interview. After about two months of trying to get people to engage with the project I decided to change my research design slightly. Originally I had planned to set up a Convergent Interview reference group but it was not possible to gather the group together. The people selected were interested but did not have the time to come together as a group due to work loads.

The slight change I made was to interview the people who had agreed to be on the reference panel. I reasoned that as they were interested in being on the reference panel they would be interested in being interviewed. I was correct. I now have three interview participants and have completed two interviews and have a third lined up for Friday this week.

The first interview went very well. The participant was asked to answer one question and a few supplemental questions. I typed the questions and printed them on a landscape piece of paper and left it on the table so that the interviewee could keep the question in mind so that they stayed focused.

I was slightly concerned that my interviewee would not remember to come or would just not bother. The participant was about five minutes late but did arrive. I was both happy and disappointed. I asked the participant to sign the release form and then started the interview.

I explained the purpose of the research and then asked the participant to read the question. The participant spent nearly 50 minutes talking about his team. The answers given aligned really well with the three theories underpinning the research. Completing the interview I realised that the readings I have been doing for the literature review made complete sense. I now believe the project will actually provide some interesting insights into teams, technology and identity.

Convergent interviewing thoughts on the process

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After completing the assignment on using Convergent Interviewing (CI) and really reading thoroughly the papers and guidance in the literature (especially the one’s by Dick, 1998) I feel that CI is definitely a method that is worth further consideration for my thesis. What I like most about it are the issues of higher validity and reliability, the focus on taking small amounts of notes rather than making full transcripts and the fact that it can be implemented as a project in its own right.

The project aspect is quite interesting in terms of getting the Reference Group together which for me is similar to having a Project Board as part of a PRINCE2 or similar project process. Organizing the Reference Group will I think be an interesting – in terms of challenging – process. I am assuming that the Reference Group would be composed mainly of departmental managers or team leaders as they would be people who would have the ability or authority to make decisions and suggestions about who should be included in the interviewing rounds.

The other interesting or challenging issue would be deciding on whether to use (at least) one other interviewer. On large projects CI tends to make use of more than one interviewer and in some of the papers I’ve looked at up to  six. Although there is always the option of carrying out all the interviews myself the big advantage is using one other interviewer would enhance the reliability of the research by allowing cross referencing and reducing bias.

Having another interviewer would add an interesting dynamic to the process of the research project. How to recruit someone to work with is an interesting problem. One thought would be to get the help of a Masters student who might be working on a similar project and to use them as a research assistant. There are possible opportunities for this in the social sciences department. This  would add an interesting additional challenge to the ethical approval process.

With CI the use of two interviewers lends reliability and reduces bias through running interviews in parallel and then immediately after the interviews have finished the interviewers immediately compare notes and decide what the key issues or themes are. From these the next round of interviews are developed.

Sharing ideas and experiences I believe is a good way of building a creative dynamic throughout the interview process. The biggest issue that I found with doing just two interviews was typing up the transcripts from the voice recording. The first interview I did was 37 minutes long and took about 2 – 3 hours to transcribe. The second was only 15 minutes long but took about an hour to transcribe. The interesting thing about transcribing that I found was making sure that I did not add or remove any words. I think dealing with interviewing 20 or 30 people would require a serious amount of organization of the material and careful planning prior to starting the work. As already stated CI technically does not make use of long transcriptions of the interviews. In fact according to Dick voice recorders are not recommended. Dick recommends only brief note taking or using mnemonics to identify themes and issues during the interview and having only a page of notes at most.

To me this implies that there is a need for quite a disciplined approach to the process. The key issue for CI is ensuring that the initial interview question is further extended and more focused in order to gather information on more specific issues. For the assignment I only focused on one of the three theories that I am aiming to use in my full research project. These are, Sensemaking, Institutional Theory and Organizational Justice. For the assignment I only referred to Organizational Justice but after the interviews I carried out I believe that all three theories are relevant to the thesis at least as drivers into a direction for the project. CI is normally or often used in areas where there is little existing theory or where an area is under researched.

For the research project I believe that CI has the potential to lead to new theory development or an extension of an existing theory.

Thoughts on why anyone would want to be interviewed, or not…

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I asked the interviewee that I used last week if I could re-interview her as part of the Convergent Interviewing process. The reply I got was interesting, basically along the lines of “you interviewed me last week why do it again?”

This got me thinking about the difficulties of interviewing and why people volunteer to be interviewed. The question is, why do people agree to take part in interviews or, what’s in it for them?

A number of points and questions arose from this thought:

  1. Getting interviewee participants is not easy. There has to be a benefit to the interviewee otherwise why would they agree to participate?
  2. What is the incentive for the interviewee participant? I think there is a very narrow and short lived engagement process that occurs in the mind of a potential participant. Possibly the potential participant’s initial thought is based on a feeling that someone is interested in what they have got to say about something – although I’m not sure what this says about randomly selected participants. Why the hell would a randomly selected person want to participate in an data collection exercise? Surely there’s even less motivation for them to participate?
  3. I can see how purposeful selection could lead to greater engagement but again there has to be some kind of incentive for the participant but I’m assuming if someone is told that they have been selected on the basis of their expertise then they might be more forthcoming.
  4. The potential difficulties of getting interview participants and getting people to agree to more than one or two interviews is potentially a difficulty if the researcher is undertaking Convergent Interviewing or just wanting to go back to speak to people again. There are also issues around timing, availability, getting a room and also if you are going back multiple times to people issues around confidentiality might come up because of something as simple as people going off for meetings.
  5. When planning interviews and selecting participants I think depending on the number of people you need to interview it would be good to have more people to interview than absolutely necessary in order to keep numbers up in case some participants decide not to turn up or walk out during an interview.
  6. In some ways small numbers of participants might be easier to manage than large numbers because you can build a closer relationship with potential interviewees and they might be more likely to make a commitment and a contribution.
  7.  I think there is a possibility that the feelings of the interviewer could have an effect on the interviewee. For example today I had a second interview scheduled with my participant from last week but I was feeling tired and did not really want to proceed. I needed to drive up some energy in order to make the interview happen again. As it turned out I did do the interview but it was not as effective as the one I did last week possibly because I was not in the mood but I also detected that the participant was also not in the mood. This could be a significant downside to interviewing – how does the interviewer keep their feelings and physical demeanor neutral so that they do not ‘contaminate’ the interviewee and influence the energy and motivation of the participant?
  8. After completing the two interviews I realized the importance of having sound questions. I found that especially in the second interview I realized that the question I asked was not specific enough but I did not want to ask a leading question either.

A lot of the literature around interviewing is based on getting a valid statistical sample and the methods that can be used to make interviewing more effective but there is not much (in the books I’ve looked at) on why people actually volunteer to be interviewed and why they don’t. I think purposeful selection of participants for interviewing might be the way forward – where this is a choice – because I think choosing people might be more effective than the random sample because of the issues around massaging ego’s on one side and people not wanting to be involved on the other.

I think I have gathered a reasonable amount of data that is interesting in terms of the research questions that I have used but I think if this was my full scale research project I would need to do a lot more work around question design and thinking more specifically what I want out of the interview. Reading the literature prior to the interviews has helped my thinking in terms of the domain of interest and contextualized in terms of what my participant has said and the restructuring process that is currently going on.

 

 

Convergent interview number two

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I am planning to carry out my second Convergent Interview on Monday 16th December with the person I interviewed this week. I’m aiming to review and draft the transcript of the interview from this week and then work out a new interview question. I will try to make sure that I am much better prepared for the next interview than the first one!

The first interview

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I carried out my first convergent interview on Tuesday morning this week. It was an interesting experience. I decided to use an information and consent form and send these to my interviewee for information. I used the LSBU forms from the ethics site. In the information form I outlined what I would be doing and what the aims of the interview were. I booked a meeting room in the university in order to ensure privacy and confidentiality. There was no telephone or computer just a table and four chairs.

It was fortunate that I had produced and sent the information form. I arrived at the meeting room about 10 minutes prior to the interview. My interviewee arrived said hello and then left to get something. I suddenly realised that due to being tied up with something just prior to leaving to the meeting room I had forgotten my notes and the interview question. A great start. Fortunately I had my iPad with me and was able to access my DropBox account where I had stored my notes and the question.

When my interview subject returned I was ready to go. My participant said that she had read my pre-interview notes and the consent form and was happy to proceed. Although I had included in the consent form a line about being able to withdraw from the interview at any time I wanted to say this but I forgot to.

I did manage to go through my notes and explain what I was intending to do. I had remembered to change the batteries in my digital recorder and I had tested it the day before. I also decided to double check the recorder instructions to make sure I knew how to use the machine.

I read in a text that once the interview has started to not touch or check the recorder as this will avoid drawing the interviewees attention to the device and interrupt the flow of the interview. I did remember this on the day.

The interview was scheduled to last between 30 and 45 minutes because the interviewee had to leave for another meeting at 11:00. After I had explained what was going to happen I spent about 5 minutes chatting about the DBA and how this module was designed to get us to practice interviewing as part of an assignment. We chatted easily for a few minutes. The interview started properly at 10:15 , I started the recorder and asked the question. I was uncertain that asking a single question would result in enough of a response. The interesting thing is that the process of convergent interviewing focuses on individuals who are likely to be able to respond to a question due to their expertise or position or interest in the issue.

After asking the question the interviewee talked non-stop for about 20 minutes without any interruption. It was not necessary for me to prompt at all. I decided not to intervene at points where I thought the interviewee was starting to run out of things to say. These points tended to be where she slowed down her speaking or briefly stopped talking. I think there is a slight fear that stopping talking is a problem in these circumstances and there is a feeling that the interviewer needs to jump in and ask another question or prompt.

Leaving the person to just stop was interesting. The short silences were actually slight moments of thought and reflection and I strongly resisted the urge to ask something. My interviewee would then naturally re-start the answer sometimes in a new direction or just continuing from where she had stopped.

At one point I did ask a follow-up question mainly for clarification and this seemed effective. It was really just a small prompting question. I did this several times in the end in order to keep the answer on track. I felt that this was within the spirit of convergent interviewing because I had not planned any but the first main question the rest became just prompts.

After 37 minutes the time was 10:55 and I decided that the interview had reached a natural stop point. I was aware that my participant needed to be away by 11:00 so I stopped the process and thanked my interviewee for her time. I said that I would be reviewing the data over the weekend and would likely come back next week with another question stemming from this first one and the result of the interview. My participant said this would be OK.

I asked her how she felt doing an interview that had one primary question and she said she had actually enjoyed the experience and felt that the experience had been like a counselling session and she had managed to talk through a lot of issues that had been of concern to her. I said I felt that she could have gone on for another hour and she agreed also mentioned that she did not really need the prompting as it was easy to talk through the issue as there was so much to discuss.

I felt that after the initial uncertain start the interview continued and was carried out well. The single question and occasional prompt asked to a person who was deeply interested in the subject was effective and produced a significant amount of useful data. I will be transcribing the data over the weekend and will see if there is another question that can be used next week. My aim now is to have one more interview with the same participant to see if convergent and divergent data emerges.

Consultation begins turbulence increases

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The university has begun a consultation process to gather the views of staff with respect of the change proposal that has been drawn up by the new VC. A series of staff forums where staff can raise issues, concerns and suggestions have begun. These are being chaired by senior managers some of whom have been given notice that their jobs are at risk of redundancy. The response of staff to the proposals at these meetings has varied between resignation and an acceptance that the Schools structure is a done deal and anger at the way that the process has been implemented. The anger at the implementation seems to fit very well with views on Organisational Justice specifically the aspect Procedural Justice and Informational Justice.

I have noticed that in the last few days formal meetings seem to always start with a discussion about the restructuring. There does not seem to be any part of the organization that has been left untouched by an element of uncertainty. I have found that asking people simple questions about the restructuring elicits long answers with strong views on the situation. This leads me to an assurance that using Convergent Interviewing is a sound method of gathering data.

An interesting point to note is in the literature on interview techniques much is made of the interview process whereby the interviewer should make an introductory statement at the beginning of the interview e.g.

  • Identify the auspices under which the research is being conducted.
  • Purposes of the research, funded or for a thesis.
  •  Indication of what the research is about.
  • Indicate why the subject has been chosen.
  • Make it clear participation is voluntary.
  • Assure the respondent that their identity will not be revealed and all information will be confidential.
  • Provide opportunity for respondent to ask questions or raise concerns.
  • Ask some simple opening questions and lead to the main substance of the interview.

(Bryman, 2012)

The interesting point is that when interviewing strangers the lead in to the main interview is probably essential in order to gain the confidence of the interviewee and to put them at ease. I have found that asking people I know and work with at work a question the usual response is for the colleague to open up with their views expansively and almost immediately. My view is that there is a strong possibility that I am going to be able to gather a lot of interview data for the assignment and the thesis project with little problem.

I have attached notes that I took at a consultation meeting that took place on Wed, Dec 04, 2013.

Consultation Meeting Notes Wed Dec 04 2013

Invitation to part time staff to consultation meetings received Thu, Dec 05, 2013.

Part time staff invitation to consultation meetings December 2014

Restructuring FAQ #1 posted Dec 05, 2013.

Restructuring FAQ 05122013

Bryman, A, (2012), Social research Methods, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK.

Turbulence continues

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The new VC has held a senior management group meeting where the change strategy was presented. A number of breakout groups were formed to discuss the changes. Feedback from the groups was essentially supportive of the strategy to move from faculties to schools. The main concerns were with the process, the perception that the institution had been thrust into a state of uncertainty and concerns about how staff will respond to this. It was agreed that staff should provide their thoughts either in teams or as individuals and feed these back to a generic email address so that the VC can start to gather view. The other main area of concern was the lack of detail in the current proposal and the fact that several senior managers have been given notice that their posts are at risk of redundancy. This was seen by many as potentially destabilising for the whole organization as there is now the possibility that some of these staff will leave before replacements have been recruited leaving the institution without leadership at a critical and turbulent time.

I am now very keen to start interviewing for the assignment as there is a lot of rich data in circulation. I would really like to interview  about ten people but at the moment this is not possible. I will however record any useful data and views here.

The issues raised at the meeting have clear resonance with the three core theories that I am considering using:

  1. Sensemaking
  2. Institutional theory
  3. Organizational Justice theory (OJ)

Issues relating to Organizational Justice are already coming to the surface, specifically issues around how the proposals for change have been developed and how these have been communicated. Staff are generally accepting of the need for the organization to change.

In terms of OJ there are some real connections between what is going on and the theory.

The study of people’s perceptions of fairness in organizations:
  • Distributive Justice:  The form of organizational justice that focuses on people’s beliefs that they have received fair amounts of valued work-related outcomes
  • Procedural Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive
  • Interpersonal Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the manner in which they are treated by other people
  • Informational Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision

The issue at the moment relates most strongly to Procedural Justice, Interpersonal Justice and Informational Justice. People do not understand the process that has brought about the changes, people do not consider the process to be fair and there is a deficit of information.

OJ also relates strongly to individual and team performance and has been shown to have an impact on customer service. These issues are clearly of concern to the organization. My question for the assignment research project is:

  1. What are the key issues that employees attend to during organizational change?
  2. How do these issues differ across the hierarchical levels of non-supervisors, supervisors and executives?

The interview question is:

Tell me what you think is good and what is bad about the change that is occurring.

I am planning on using Convergent Interviewing which is a form of semi-structured interviewing. The structure is supplied by the initial question and then the interviewer leaves the interviewee to speak for as long as they like. This can be up to 90 minutes. The interviewer can use small prompts to keep the interviewer talking such as asking ‘what else’, ‘how do you fell about that’, nodding but mainly being very attentive.

In some ways the change is happening about a year too soon. By the time I get to asking the question for the main project the change situation will be about a year into the change. It’ is likely that some of the staff in the institution will no longer be working there in a year. This is a little frustrating.

 

More thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence »

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The situation where I would like to carry out the research for my assignment is changing rapidly. The new CEO has presented the plan for changing the organizational structure to the board of governors and there is a meeting on Monday 25th November with senior managers. At the meeting it is expected that information will be presented outlining the new structure.

I will need to identify some key participants to interview soon as I want to make sure that I speak to people who are currently in existing posts and roles and who may be or will be affected by changes. This will allow me the potential to go back at a later point to review their opinions on the changes after they have been implemented.

The feeling of organizational turbulence has definitely increased over the past week due to the build up to the meeting this week. There is an increasing feeling of uncertainty and apprehension. This is very rich material for carrying out the interviews. I would expect to find that people are attempting to make sense of the situation and would also expect to find that people discuss issues relating to justice and how decisions have been decided on by the executive.

Since my last post I have been looking at various papers investigating large scale change in organizations. I have also been looking at methods for organizing my assignment  literature review. In doing this I came across two related and very interesting papers. One Introducing the Literature Grid: Helping Undergraduates Consistently Produce Quality Literature Reviews by Peter Yacobucci (2012). I have created a spreadsheet for the purpose from the specification in the paper and this seems to work very well and I think it will be very helpful. I looked at using NVivo 10 for the literature review but I found the application crashed several times.

I found I had wasted a lot of time setting things up in NVivo 10 so at the moment I am sticking with the spreadsheet. During the search for a method of organizing my literature I started to search for papers  in Emerald on interview techniques. In one, Employee perceptions of organizational change: impact of hierarchical level by Jones. L, Watson. B, Hobman. E, Bordia. P, Gallios. C, Callan. V (2008).

The abstract describes the paper as, The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organizational level on employees’ perceptions and reactions to a complex organizational change involving proposed work force redesign, downsizing and a physical move to a new hospital. I found this paper to have several similarities to the situation that I am intending to investigate in my assignment.

I realised that as the situation is similar but separated by time and being a different field (a hospital) I noted that the authors specify two research questions that I could re-use in my own research. In my view it is perfectly acceptable to re-use these questions because the situations are different and it would be interesting to see how the outcomes of my assignment study differ or are similar to this study.

What I found to be very interesting in the paper is a reference to Convergent Interviewing. When I first read the paper I did not pick up that this is in fact a specific interviewing technique. I re-read the paper and found that the interviewers asked their participants only one question. I found this confusing at first. After looking up references to Convergent Interviewing I found that the technique is based on asking just one question. The question has to be very well crafted in order to illicit a significant response from interviewees.

In the paper there is a question that chimes with my own research so in the same way that I am going to use the research questions I will use the same interview question. According to the papers on Convergent Interviewing the interviewer should ask the question and then use deep listening in order to focus on the answer and use some small prompts if necessary. The aim is to allow the participant about an hour to 90 minutes to talk about their thoughts and views. The interviewer records the main points of the interview in their notebook.

I think it is going to be a challenging getting my participants to respond adequately to one question. On the other hand I believe that people who are struggling to make sense of a turbulent situation will be willing to talk about their feelings and opinions because they will have strong views on the situation – either positive or negative.

I will be approaching some interview candidates this week.

 

 

Thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence

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I have now decided to stay with the topics of sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence for my assignment and thesis. At the session on Saturday 16th November I went through my presentation with the group after initially thinking that I would not bother as I thought it was not going to be good enough. I also had  a bit of confidence loss in what I am doing. Whilst doing the presentation  I realised that the topics and themes are actually worthwhile. I received good feedback from the group.

I need now to firm up my thinking on a whole range of issues including:

  1. Questions – I need to repeat the Goldilocks test on the questions but more importantly I need to make sure that the questions will be able to elicit responses of value to the research.
  2. Methodology – I need to make a decision at least for the assignment on the methods that I am going to use. My initial thoughts are that Grounded Theory would be a good place to start because it will allow me the opportunity to practice coding in software (such as NVivo).
  3. Scope of the assignment research project – this needs to be carefully crafted as there is going to be a very limited amount of time to carry out the actual research component and I will need to identify people who can possibly provide data.
  4. For the assignment I am going to look at doing a small amount of triangulation by finding relevant documents and carrying out some textual analysis.
  5. Ethics – I will need to inform the participants that ethical approval has been granted and that they have the right to curtail the interview if they wish to do so.
  6. Participants – I need to identify the participants for the assignment. I only need one or two people for the assignment and there is an opportunity to interview the current VC before he leaves at the end of December. I would want to have some excellent questions though before proceeding as I would not want to waste his or my time.
  7. Timeline – I need to work up a firm timeline for the research. This should be straight forward, assuming I can get the participants on board.
  8. Literature review – I need to work on my literature review very, very soon. I have been doing a lot of reading recently but I need to get my references into Mendeley and organised into categories.
  9. Theory – I need to firm up the underlying theories that I am going to use. I was thinking of using ANT which is complementary to the Case Study method but Grounded Theory is similar in terms of following the actor.