Tag: qualitative research

Sample Literature Analysis

Article: Le, J. K, Tissington, P. A., & Budhwar, P. (2010). To move or not to move – a question of family? International Journal of Human Resource Management, 21(1), 17–45. CYBRARY – Business Source Premier

Issue or problem

The primary issue that Le et al (2010) wanted to study was the effect that family-on-work and work-on-family have.  They decide to do this research on relocation, as it is the most prevalent, direct, and most invasive aspect of work impinging its lives of the employees and its family members.  They break down the effect it has on intermediate family members compared to those on the external family members.  With further break down of the intermediate family members on the spouse and their children. The authors focused primarily on 62 Military Personnel (from UK’s Royal Air Force), because relocation in these situations is less of a choice, and they relocate many times that this is the extreme case scenario.

Stated purpose

After the economic periods in the late 2000s, advancements in technology, higher than normal unemployment, and globalization, relocation for the purpose of work-related issues is on a rise for the past decade (le et al, 2010).  Work relocation directly impacts the family, thus studying how family and work interact with each other with a single point of commonality (the employee) is why this aspect was studied.

A lot of studies have looked into the negative effects on relocation on the family or on the employee.  A lot of studies measure this as a one-way relationship.  Le et al (2010), is trying to study a bidirectional positive and negative impact of relocation on work and family.  They want to use exploratory qualitative research to help find variables or themes (to be used in future quantitative studies).  The researchers also wanted to use this exploratory study to make suggestions on how to mitigate the negative side effects of relocation on the employee’s family and vice versa.

Theoretical (concept or construct) focus or topic

Relocation impacts could be defined loosely as:

Relocation effects on the employee ~ F (- marital status, – number of kids, – spousal employment, spousal support, marital status) * G (adjustment time, willingness)

It should be noted that the function above doesn’t contain weights, but just the positive or negative effect of each variable.  Weights can imply and add more meaning to this equation.  This equation was defined by lee et al (2010) survey of the literature.  These are some of the main factors that were addressed or brought up during a qualitative exploratory study of 62 military personnel.

The concepts or constructs defined

Spillover and facilitation were defined as the key to this analysis.  Spillover is defined as aspects of work that affect the family.  Whereas facilitation doing one thing for work positively impacts another thing for work.  These are needed in order for the study to take place.  If spillover doesn’t happen then how does family impact work and work impact the family through the employee?  If relocation doesn’t positively impact the career of the employee, then why would the employee undergo it?  So, there has to be a perceived or actualized benefit to relocation, before the employee moves or decides to leave their employer all together to avoid the relocation.

Research approach

The authors took an exploratory qualitative approach for their study.  Their main reason for this approach was to explore themes in relocation affecting the family, and the family affecting the relocation.  Their hopes were to identify themes for a future study that could measure the relative strengths of these themes through a quantitative approach. They also state that quantitative tools are insufficient at this part of the exploratory phase, whereas qualitative work has a particular advantage to it.  You need to know which themes to study on your sample before you can devise the appropriate measurement instrument and analysis tool.  Though this can be accomplished through an extensive analysis of the literature, the authors did state that the bidirectional relationship of family and work with respect to relocation is the gap in the current knowledge.

Conducting 30 minutes and 2 hours (average of 1 hour) long interviews with 62 military personnel, allowed to collect these themes.  Another aspect of qualitative research that was used is the three measures for validity.  Face validity (summarizing responses and getting confirmation back from the interviewers), Confirmation (asking clarifying questions), and peer examination (independent peers evaluating and commenting on the questions and findings), are used in this qualitative study, which is what makes this study appropriate for their purpose.

Conclusions of the study

Le et al (2010) stated that for the role of a family member, employees face issues like: guilt that arise from a lack of fulfilling family commitments and needs during relocation and pride due to advantages manifesting in the family because of relocation.

For the spouse of the employee, they face issues like: work-related issues (reduced earning potential, unemployment, and hire-ability), psychosocial impact (anger, depression, etc.), and social impacts (loss of social network, community, and friends).

For the children of the employees, they face issues like: school-related impacts (they may fall behind or speed ahead, depending on where they were relocated on and it is diminished if they were placed in boarding school), psychological impact (mirrors that of the spouse), and social impact (hard time making friends, but strengthens internal family bonds).

Finally for the extended family, though it can be hard to establish a connection, some found it amazing that they got to visit a new place to see the relocated family from time to time.

However, there can be a devastating impact on the family unit, separation can occur (divorce) if there is no focus on family, but only on one’s career, and if relocation fatigue (due to multiple relocations in a span of a few years) occurs.

With all of this work impacting the family, the family can impact the work.  The researchers found that the family can try to influence when and how they move.  This effect is amplified when the employee involves the family in the decision.  Doing this will increase buy-in from all members, and makes the family happier in the end.  The family can defer or accelerate the relocation depending on their own plans.  But, if the company pushes the relocation, the family could exert pressure on the employee as well, to a point where the employee will leave (think of leaving or be aware of the option) the organization because they would prefer to keep their family intact.

Recommendations for future research

This study involved military families.  They relocate every 2 to 3 years, more often than most families around the world.  In most of these cases, rejecting relocation is not a wise facilitating option.  For these reasons, this is an extreme case for employee relocation, as lee et al (2010), noted.  Thus, the study can be applied to generic global and national level companies.  Finally, now that they have identified themes, we can measure their strength/magnitude and correlations between each theme to relocation effects on family and family effects on relocation.

 

Observational protocol and qualitative documentations

As a researcher, you could be a non-participant to a full-on participant when observing your subjects in a study.  Thus, the observed/empathized behavioral and activities of individuals in the study are jotted down in field notes (Creswell, 2013).  Most researchers use an observational protocol to jotting down these notes as they observe their subjects.  According to Creswell (2013), this protocol could consist of: “separate descriptive notes (portraits of the participants, a reconstruction of dialogue, a description of the physical setting, accounts of particular events, or activities) [to] reflective notes (the researcher’s personal thoughts, such as “speculation, feelings, problems, ideas, hunches, impressions, and prejudices), … this form might [have] demographic information about the time, place, and date of the field setting where the observation takes place.”

Whereas, observational work can be combined with in-depth interviewing, and sometimes the observational work (which can be an everyday activity) can help prepare the researcher for the interviews (Rubin, 2012).  Doing so can increase the quality of the interviews because the interviewers know what the researcher has seen or read and can provide more information on those materials.  This can also allow the researcher to master the terminology before entering the interview. Finally, Rubin (2012) also states that cultural norms become more visible through observation rather than just a pure in-depth interview.

In Creswell (2013), Qualitative Documents are information contained within documents that could help a researcher out in their study that could be either public (newspapers, meeting minutes, official reports) and/or private (personal journals/diaries, letters, emails, internal manuals, written procedures, etc.) documents.  This can also include pictures, videos, educational materials, books, files. Whereas, Artifact Analysis is the analysis of the written text, usually are charts, flow sheets, intake forms, reports, etc.

The main analysis approach of this document would be to read the document to gain a subject matter understanding.  Document analysis would aid in quickly grouping, sorting and resort the data obtained for a study.  This manual will not be included in the coded dataset, but will help provide appropriate codes/categories for the interview analysis, in other words give me suggestions about what might be related to what.   Finally, one way to interpret this document would be for triangulation of data (data from multiple sources that are highly correlated) between the observation, interviews and this document.   

References

Some Qualitative Methodologies

This blog post will differentiate among the following qualitative designs:

    • Phenomenology (e.g. Georgi, Moustakas, etc.)
    • Grounded theory (e.g. Glaser, Strauss, etc.)
    • Ethnography (e.g. White, Benedict, Mead, etc.)
    • Case Studies (e.g. Yin, etc.)

The Implicit goal of qualitative data analysis is truth, objectivity, trustworthiness, and accuracy of data (Glaser, 2004). All methods have the observer usually exercising little bias in their thoughts to help further their analysis or development of their core theory.  Researchers here are observers taking notes to help them in their study.

Phenomenology (Giorgi, 2006): It is the study of experiential phenomena through encountering an instance of it, describing it, and using free imagination variation to determine its essence. Thus, making the phenomena more generalizable.  Though it should be noted that the experience should exist without preconceived biases (a neutral party), and one way of doing so is listing out your entire biases related to the phenomena.  This removal of biases will help limit the claims to the way we experienced the phenomena.

Grounded Theory (Glaser, 2004): It is the study of a set of grounded concepts, which create a core theory/category that forms a hypothesis.  Data is collected, but as it is analyzed “line by line”, the researcher asks: “What is this data a study of?”, “What category does this incident indicate?”, “What is actually happening in the data?”, “What is the main concern being faced by the participants?”, and “What Accounts for the continual resolving of this concern?”  These questions are asked within the most minimum of preconception.  The use of literature is treated as another source of data to be integrated into the analysis and core theory/category.  However, literature is not used before the emergence of a core theory/category arises from the data.

Ethnography (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994, Mead, 1933): It is studying the customs of people and cultures, usually on a few numbers of cases (maybe one case), through analyzing unstructured data (not previously coded) with no aim of testing a hypothesis.  Analysis of the data may revolve quantification and statistics on the explicit interpretation of the data.

Thus, grounded theory seeks to find meaning in data and find a core concept/category/theory/variable.  Ethnography tends to seek meaning in the customs of people, which can exist in a single case study.  Phenomenology seeks to study the phenomena that have occurred while keeping in mind all the possible variables that can influence it.  So, a certain topic can be explored using each of these methods, and they are looking at the same problem just with different preconceptions (or lack thereof), thus adding to the further understanding of that topic.  These are all collection of data methods, whereas case studies are a research strategy.

A problem needs to arise in order for research to occur.  A gap in knowledge can be seen as a problem.  Thus, case studies are a strategy that can be used to help shine some light at that gap and using any of the techniques aforementioned the research can try to fill in that gap of knowledge.  If you are aiming for grounded theory, you may have a ton of case studies to look through to seek common themes, whereas ethnography may be concerned about one or two cases and what happened in those cases.  Phenomenology can use as many case studies necessary to explore any particular phenomena in question.

Case Studies Research (Yin, 1981): Can contain both qualitative and quantitative data (e.g. fieldwork, records, reports, verbal reports, observations, memos, etc.), and it is independent of any particular data collection method.  Case studies concern themselves in a real-life phenomenon, and when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not known, yet aim to be either exploratory, descriptive and/or explanatory.  It is a strategy similar to experiments, simulations, and histories.

Since, case studies can be “an accurate rendition of the facts of the case” (Yin, 1981), most of that data cannot be described quantitatively in a quick manner. Sometimes, descriptions and qualitative data paint the picture of what is being studied much more clearly than if we were to do this with just numbers.  Can you picture that over a million people saw the ball drop on Time Square in 2015, or 14 blocks of thousands of people adorned in foam Planet Fitness hats and waving purple noodle balloons, eagerly cheered as the ball dropped on Time Square in 2015. This is why most case study research involves the collection of qualitative data.

References:

  • Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnography and participant observation. Handbook of qualitative research, 1(23), 248-261.
  • Glaser, B. G., & Holton, J. (2004, May). Remodeling grounded theory. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 5, No. 2).
  • Giorgi, A. (2008). Difficulties encountered in the application of the phenomenological method in the social sciences. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 8(1).
  • Mead, M. (1933). More comprehensive field methods. American Anthropologist, 35(1), 1-15.
  • Yin, R. K. (1981). The case study crisis: Some answers. Administrative science quarterly, 58-65.