Access to cases in public organisations

"getting acquiescence to interviewees is perhaps the easiest task in case study research" {Stake, 2005:65}

Such acquiescence is not easy for researching consultant-client relationships. Both parties are shy - skittish. Getting into central government is even more difficult because of the sensitivity and secrecy - hardly surprising given the criticism central government departments can face, like "x department spent so much on consultants or £m wasted on failed government IT. It's about politics here on the BBC. And selling papers here.

Such criticism may not be deserved - government servants face so much accountability and their top people do not want to be hauled up in front of a select committee to explain a public failure. Neither do their suppliers. Is it only the specialist IT media that report the less political good news here?

Maybe they suspect the motives of researchers looking for bad news, and don't believe they are looking to see how they do what they do together. On top of that, they are busy, just plain working with little spare time to explain what they do to outsiders - wouldn't they have to account for their time anyhow?

As a researcher I'm a guest. Despite the research area being a matter of public interest, I have no scholarly right to know {Stake, 2005}, but am a guest in their spaces. My manners must be good and I have no intention of exploiting or embarrassing anybody.

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STAKE, R. E. (2005) Qualitative case studies. IN DENZIN, N. K. & LINCOLN, Y. S. (Eds.) The sage handbook of qualitative research. London, Sage Publications.

Interview quotes

Kvale has some guidelines for reporting interview quotes. It's timely that I've found them, because I'm just writing up some interviews, and before now, my supervisors have criticised my writing for having too many quotes, over-long quotes, and not linking quotes up with my own explanations.

Kvale suggests:

1. relate quotes to the general text
2. contextualise the quotes
3. interpret the quotes
4. there should be a balance between quotes and text
5. quotes should be short
6. use only the best quote
7. interview quotes should be rendered in a written style
8. there should be a simple signature system for editing the quotes.

Kvale expands on each of these guidelines - they're worth reading.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing (page 266, Box 14.4)

Transcripts

For all the interviews on my first couple of case studies, I did the transcription. Some of the later interviews I get transcribed. However, there're issues about transcription.

In one case study, most of the interviews took place in an otherwise empty meeting room. sound was clear - or it was to me anyhow as I didn't have anything to compare when I came to transcribe. No interruptions happened. The table available to sit at together was short, so interviewer and interviewee could sit at a corner at right angle,s and usually the participant interviewee came in and chose a seat at the end of the table with his/ her back to the door.

Another interview was in a meeting room with a big table that took up most of the room. I had a helper who sat on one site, and the participant on the other opposite the helper. Acoustics were good, but the interviews were rushed because of circumstance. Another time, there were two participants together, squeezed into a corner of a room with me and my helper. Later my helper commented that perhaps her presence might have affected what was said - interesting. Again, that interview was rushed. But the acoustics were adequate.

I've done several interviews in what I thought was a quiet office with good acoustics and no interruptions but a transcriber has commented on unclear speech. I've done interviews in quite noisy rooms with lots of other people, yet the quality was good and the transcriber reported no problems.

Listening again to the interviews with problems, it seems there might be two issues.

1. the speaker was unclear,
   
2. the transcriber might have a different accent from the speaker

Having read Kvale on transcription, I now realise that in transcribing, I'm constructing something to model the conversation that took place so I'm now annotating transcriptions where I hear something different from what the transcriber put down. Not only are there differences in what people might hear from the recording, but the body language is missing, the action of sketching diagrams as we talked is missing, and I've gone through each transcription anonymising all identifiable information.

So I've created my own construction on what was discussed before I've even started any analysis.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing

Interview structure

What words do you use in an interview to get the information you want?

I structured my interview questions round {Nahapiet & Ghoshal's framework with the three dimensions of social capital:

• structural
• cognitive
• relational

so I had questions about each of these, but the words were useless for interview purposes. Like you don't go and say to someone

"Tell me about your appropriable organisation."

They're going to go "What?!" And you can't bluntly ask

"Who do you get on with?"

Supervisors helped me write simpler questions like "Who do you spend most time with?" Also sup#2 says that we've got a couple of academics here who know techniques that help a researcher elicit people’s networks of contacts.

I've rewritten the interview schedule and drafted an agenda. I've tested them on a fellow student and seem to have elicited some information on structure in a job he once had. I'm not so sure yet about the cognitive and relational aspects. Slow progress.

Now, get access!

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842