Data analysis procedures

The combination of three data collection methods has had a number of purposes: offering different opportunities to participate; building a multi faceted picture of the existence and nature of a ripple effect; and, with the inclusion of a questionnaire, helping to corroborate findings from earlier phases of data collection. In this section I provide an overview to outline sequential and cyclical aspects of the data analysis process followed by details of the stages in the process.

3.4.1 Overview of the procedures

I chose thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001), a staged analytic process involving increasing levels of abstraction, to distill the team members’ interview data and generate the ‘global themes’ that represent the essential data. One advantage of this analytic approach is in the production of networks of themes that then underpin discussion of the central global theme for the network. In this study three networks were generated from which competing influences were discerned in the data to be discussed in detail in Chapters Five, Six and Seven.

Separately salient themes were identified in the data from the leaders’ interviews through an iterative process of listening to the audiotapes, reading and rereading the transcripts and spotting the prevalence of themes and also those that contrasted with the wider teams’ data. Finally with regard to the online questionnaire responses it was important to present these data visually to facilitate the process of comparing and contrasting with the data from the interviews and anecdote circles. A feature of this study is that it is challenging to combine the results of these different methods of data collection.

3.4.2 Stages in the analysis process

Themes identified from all three methods have been integrated in keeping with the commitment to maintain anonymity of participants. It is recognised that some overlap exists as the unit of data collection has been individuals who may participate in more than one data collection. However this overlap is sufficiently small to allow a rich understanding of the topic in a single organisational context. The process of abstraction to the essence of the data (global themes) resonates with the thrust of the study, which is to understand what lies at the heart of a particular phenomenon.

Interviews with the wider team and with the leaders were transcribed in confidence by a third party with the agreement of Quantum. I then familiarised myself with the wider team’s data by checking for accuracy against the audiotapes and continued through an iterative process of reading, listening to audiotapes to spot salient and recurrent issues and then generating codes in relation to perceived influences discerned by team members. In order to remain open-minded this was done with no predetermined coding system. Extracts with quotations from the transcripts were grouped to generate codes and preliminary basic themes.

The next stage involved personally transcribing the verbal data from the two anecdote circles that enabled me also to notice differences in the dynamics of each group. Following the same process already used to analyse the interview data, I generated codes and subsequently preliminary basic themes to add to those generated from the interview data. These aggregated preliminary themes, combined with insights from the literature, and also insights based on my personal experience of organisations, then shaped the creation of relevant questions for the company questionnaire. Hence the first stage of thematic analysis resulted in a collection of preliminary basic themes and enabled the questionnaire to be designed and administered. I then returned to the thematic analysis process to continue the journey towards the essential ‘global’ themes in the interview and anecdote circle data.

With the questionnaire in train the next step in the thematic network analysis was to distill the preliminary basic themes to identify basic themes and organising themes in the interview and anecdote circle data. This involved listening again to audiotapes of both sets of verbal data, re-reading the transcripts, and generating and arranging codes and quotations to produce the second stage basic themes. Once this process was completed I then distilled these basic themes further to create organising themes that represented ‘larger shared issues’ (Attride-Stirling, 2001, p392). To continue towards identifying global themes, the process involved seeing patterns representing the ‘bigger picture’ and devising prompts in the form of questions to stimulate my thinking and encourage the shift towards the final global themes: the core ‘messages’ in the data. I

will provide further details of this process to accompany the presentation of the overall thematic network analysis in my introduction to Chapter Five, the first of three findings chapters.

With regard to the questionnaire, a wealth of data, including narrative detail, needed to be presented visually to spot the prevalence of themes in the overall data and also to discern inconsistencies in comparison with the verbal data. For the visual presentation of the data I gave specific instructions on the required diagrams and charts to a third party who was proficient in Survey Monkey data presentation processes. I agreed a specific confidentiality contract prior to allowing access to the online data via password. 3.4.3 Data integration

The process of data integration had several aspects presented as sequential and cyclical activities in Figure 3.3. The sequence of data collection phases enabled me to familiarise myself with the data over time. The thematic network analysis of the verbal data was also based on a sequence of activities aimed at distilling the data to essential themes (Attride-Stirling, 2001). However in practice the thematic network analysis became a cyclical process involving ‘interpretative’ cycles to move from familiarisation with the data towards defining essential themes (Braun and Clarke, 2006, p87). The overall procedures for data analysis involved iterative ‘practical’ cycles to uncover as much meaning as possible in the interview and anecdote circle data and from the questionnaire data.

In this way thematic network analysis provided the route to integrating team members’ verbal data at increasing levels of abstraction to arrive at essential themes. This resulted in three thematic networks that provided the foundation for the discussion of three sets of findings presented in Chapters Five, Six and Seven. Salient themes identified in the leaders’ interview data were integrated into each set of findings shown by juxtaposing leaders’ extracts and team members’ extracts to draw out the dynamic nature of the data. Company questionnaire data provided a final layer in the data integration process by introducing wider participant feedback.

3.5 The effect of the researcher’s presence in the research setting and analysis of