Closing the Convergent Interview

Convergent interview in this study was a systematic and logical process of examination, discussion and questioning of interviewees with the aim to determine their ideas, thoughts, opinions, and understandings, to ensure that groups of adequate and suitable barriers are suggested for further investigations during the next stages of triangulation entitled stages II and III, respectively. This is one of the reasons why the interviewer decided to rely on note taking of what is suggested by the interviewees for examination, rather than just doing tape recording of the voices of interviewees.

The interviewer further tried to clarify the ideas, thoughts, opinions and understandings of the interviewees about the groups of barriers they determined through their own knowledge and experience of national fishery safety and competitiveness. The identification of group of barrier

was made difficult by the tendency of the interviewees to use very broad terms such as “problem with safety of fishery product is the cause of the export ban”; contrary to the specific example, such as “no PRPs in national fishery businesses”. As a result, certain description or explanation by the interviewees about their experience of lack of fishery safety system in fishery businesses needs to be converted into generic barriers by the interviewee guided by the researcher. The critical review of the group of barriers, aids the process of converging on significant concepts because it enables those ideas, which are synonyms to be eliminated or avoided to prevent data redundancy. On the other hand it also allows for those groups of barriers which are different all together to be reviewed and reconstructed in a more useful and realistic manner. Another important thing does by convergent interview involves allowing a kind of critical and diligent examination of the suggestions given so that the interviewees can deduce a group of barriers identified instead of the interviewer starts meddling by placing their own views or ideas onto the data collected.

Before closing this interview, the researcher identified the appropriate number of suggested barriers that would cover the ideas, thoughts and understandings conceptualized by the interviewees. The number of terms of barriers identified was also calculated to prevent too few terms or too many terms. The reasons are that too few barriers would suggest that several concepts were combined together and thus making them difficult to stand clearly and understand properly, whilst too many terms would suggest that group of barriers are being unnecessarily sub-divided and lead to proliferation of barriers with certain concepts not really suggested and shared by the interviewees.

In fact, too few groups of barriers could lead to the repetition of barriers initially identified, and the danger is that this is not enough to allow the degree of discrimination necessary to further examine the concept in stages II and III. Therefore generic barriers such as “problem with safety of fishery product is the cause of the export ban” could be identified, but would hardly become meaningful or useful to the study except further examination and clarification are made, because the researcher does not know exactly what are the true problems with the safety of fishery products.

Such a barrier would not even help the researcher to know if the problem with the safety of fishery products are solely workmanship problem or regulatory problem or management problem or technical problem or several different aspects of undefined problems could emerge without direction for targeted intervention. Equally too many groups of barriers could cause other problems especially when it comes to identify the correct number of terms because of over- grouping of barriers. The researcher therefore tried to avoid the situation where barriers after barriers are identified, but at the same time differ from each other in a very complex form that made it difficult to group them meaningfully to effectively achieve the aims and objectives of the research.

The researcher also observed that some of the terms suggested by the interviewees were conflated with other groups, and if such terms were not clearly identified it could cause difficulties in data analysis in the next chapter of this study. Therefore the process of examining terms, during the interview process, in this study avoided the danger for the interviewee to use a term or word in a way that the interviewer would not even understand and has not normally use it, and thus helped to prevent the misunderstanding of concepts between interviewee and interviewer.

3.9.8 Conclusions

Despite the numerous advantages of convergent interview in triangulation, there are still some problems associated with the method. In convergent interview, there is no objective way to know whether the correct number of groups of barriers have been determined, and that subsequent interviewing of the stakeholders later might suggest some more groups of barriers. The author therefore continued the interview until there was a degree of saturation wherein no more new group of data emerged or even forthcoming. This degree of saturation assures the researcher that most of the group of barriers is accessed, but it was also predicted or hypothesized that barriers that could be accrued over a longer term than that covered in this study may not have been covered. One of the bases of this prediction or hypothesis is that the barriers identified here are focused on national level where there are mixtures of SMEs of fishery businesses. Due to the chronic nature of fishery safety problems at national level, there will be no doubt that, more

barriers could be identified if this study is carried out in smaller businesses in future. Another drawback is that if a presently defined barrier ceased to exist after sometimes they may not be identified in convergent interview except where this will not be captured in the CI process, unless the work was repeated longitudinally.

Convincingly, the theme suggested in this first stage of interview is an agreed number of groups of barriers such that this can be understood and assessed by all stakeholders involved in fishery operations in the country in their determinations during Stages II and III. Eventually, the capturing of barriers has a certain degree of subjectivity, and therefore the eighteen groups identified are all sub-divisions, or subsets, of the overarching barriers. It was obvious during the interview process that several stakeholders were not theoretically or conceptually knowledgeable in HACCP, and their preferred way of understanding HACCP barriers seemed to be through their practical experiences and personal examples of events in fishery operations. For example when asked to conceptualise or articulate their experiences of HACCP barriers in national fishery businesses, the stakeholders often found it difficult to explain exactly what they meant, but with appropriate questioning, it was possible to dig out from the mass of impressions and experiences, a set of groups of barriers that they would agree had meaning for them and the country at large.