Data analysis procedure

According to the development of the interview guideline (see 3.5.2), data generated from the interviews to be analysed were electronically recorded and transcribed. The interviews were conducted and transcribed in German, as that is the corporate language. The results of the interviews were processed using a content analysis procedure (Schreier, 2012) on the basis of the German material. Only after the analysis was completed, results were translated into English by me. Taking the constructivist position of the “passionate participant”, facilitating the reconstruction of understanding (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) I was in a better position to do the translation than any other person, having conducted the interviews myself

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and being part of the corporate culture. The position of a participant observer (see 3.4.1) facilitated a feeling for the meaning of what was said, especially in regard to company-specific language. To ensure the accurate translation, I used the chance to call the interviewees back after conducting the interview for clarification of what was said (if necessary), used different dictionaries to get a feeling for varying nuances of word meanings and consulted native speakers in cases of doubt. These different options were undertaken to ensure credibility and transferability.

Content analysis (Schreier, 2012) is a systematic technique to describe and frame the content of gathered material. The process includes data reduction by the derivation of themes or categories of topics and interpretation of the content (Tharenou et al., 2007). An important part of the process is coding, to scan the material for clusters of topics. According to Schreier (2012 p. 6) the following steps are involved in qualitative content analysis:

1. Deciding on the research question. 2. Selecting research.

3. Building a coding frame.

4. Dividing the material into units of coding.

5. Trying out, evaluating and modifying the coding frame. 6. Main analysis.

7. Interpretation and presentation of findings.

With the above steps three to five, the coding frame is built and then adjusted to the material. As the coding frame is to some extent data-driven, the analysis is flexible, following and reducing the data. By abstracting the concrete information in the material, different main categories are identified. These categories are the aspects to focus on, based on the research questions (Schreier, 2012). In the research project, the main categories, further divided by clusters, therefore represent the topics that were talked about. The subcategories – in this research called keywords - represent what was said about the main categories by the interviewees. For the names of the clusters the exact (translated) wording of one or more of the answers were assigned, where possible. By identification and assigning

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of answers to the subcategories, options of what was said about the main categories were clustered and reduced to the subcategories. How many distinctions of subcategories are needed was determined by the research questions and the gathered data. Therefore the coding frame structured the material by main categories specifying relevant aspects and subcategories specifying relevant meanings concerning this aspect.

While developing the coding frame, care has to be taken that there is no mixing of dimensions, that subcategories are mutually exclusive, that each unit of coding can be assigned to at least one subcategory in the coding frame and that each subcategory is used at least once (Schreier, 2012). A three-step process was applied: first four of the interviews transcripts were examined for a trial coding to develop and try out an initial coding frame. According to Schreier (2012) as a rule of thumb and a trade-off between practicability and variability of the material, 10 to 20% of the material should be included in the trial coding; in this research project the four interviews equalled 30% of the quantity of the interviews. Second a few days after the initial coding frame was developed and tested with a trial coding, the main coding started, which included the entire material. In this process, the transcriptions of the interviews were segmented by the questions or themes according to the interview guideline, which was a homogeneous underlying structure of all interviews. The segmentation and coding segment by segment ensured to do the coding decision in the same manner and thus increase validity of the coding according to Gläsel and Laudel (2010). With the main coding, the initial coding frame was developed further and categories added as well as combined. The third step was to do the coding again to increase validity of the coding frame after a pause of three weeks. Schreier (2012) suggests doing the coding with more than one researcher to increase validity of the coding frame; as there was no second researcher available, a re-coding was done by me. The coding frame was adjusted again according to the data, so that the coding frame is data-driven, as Gläsel and Laudel (2010) propose. The coding was carried out using the NVivo software package, which helped to flexibly change and merge categories within the coding frame. The findings of the analysis in the resulting logic and order of the coding

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frame (see Annex 4) Coding frame (German)), their discussion and interpretation are dealt with in chapter four.