Data Collection: Methods

This section will discuss the two kinds of assumptions about knowledge and information that I have adopted for both of my data collection phases (pilot and main study). It will describe how I have operated with different techniques for collecting data from the participants during the data collection phase. These models of data collection will serve to illustrate how the method for collecting data has operationalised the epistemology and the stance that I have taken. In brief, the models that were adopted in data collection derive from an information-extraction and shared understanding model based on Franklin (1997), cited in Ryan (2006). The author has introduced three models for data collection: information extraction, shared understanding and discourse. However, only the first two has been chosen for this study based on their prescriptive nature, although model two is less prescriptive than model one. First, the information-extraction model has been chosen for the preliminary phase as at that stage the data was still mostly ‘cut and dried’ (Ryan, 2006). At the later phase, the researcher has moved

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into the shared understanding based where the aim was “to obtain rich, nuanced, descriptive material that reflects the interviewee’s understanding of his/her world (or part of it) and lends itself to the qualitative analysis in one or more modes” (ibid, p.77), for example, the identification and categorisation of central/global themes or important risk and safety factors for event risk management and safety. The reasons for adopting these two models are discussed in the following section of data collection procedure.

3.5.1 Semi-structured Interviews

“Qualitative design is concerned with the personal, face-to-face, and immediate”

(Janesick, 2000, p.385), so interviews are the most common method used in qualitative inquiry, in which case “the best interviews is face-to-face where people honour each other with patience and consideration” (Stake, 2004, p.148). As such, I have chosen semi-structured face-to-face interviewing and adopted reflexive procedures as my main approach/method for this study. It was felt that semi-structured interviews using some axial coding based upon the categories of risks proposed by Allen et al. (2002) would be of use, combined with a quantity of open coding to allow for other risk categories not currently referred to be included and incorporate the ability of emergent issues to be coded prior to the main data collection stage.

I have employed altogether 33 individual semi-structured face to face interviews and one group interview, as well as one telephone interview. I agree with Creswell’s (2007) view that most case study employs in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information, but my attempt to employ documentary analysis has come to no avail because documents pertaining to risk and safety have been regarded by most participants as their organisation’s intellectual property and been treated as ‘strictly private and confidential to their members only’. There was an occasion when one of the participants agreed to show me his company’s risk and safety guidelines but he needed to have permission from his top management that never materialised. Another respondent asked me to look into her organisation’s website to get the documents on safety and risk management, but later I found out that the relevant

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documents were not offered for public view. Efforts to contact her later on also came to no avail, including an email to the company’s contacts asking for the materials. However, there were some documents that I have analysed pertaining to the legal and safety aspects such as all the Malaysian legal acts relevant to my topic. I have summarised those laws and acts mentioned by my participants in the interviews (refer to chapter 6). Other than that, I have also examined a number of risk and safety documents, including guidelines related to event management disciplines from various other organisations outside Malaysia, particularly the Purple Handbook (UK), HSE (UK), and other safety guidelines provided by the Australian and US based organisations.

Meetings were arranged at places of mutual agreement and mostly the interviews were held at the participants’ place of employment. There were also several cases in which the face to face interview sessions were held at cafes and restaurants within the city of Kuala Lumpur and its surroundings. In such cases there was a bit of minimal noise interference. All interview sessions were digitally recorded using a Dictaphone (voice recorder) and later transcribed verbatim post-interview by the researcher. The purpose of this practice was to ensure that everything said is preserved for later analysis (Merriam, 2009). Prior to data collection, a number of selected informants were approached for formal in-depth interviewing sessions that were held face to face at a time and place most convenient to the respondents. From the total number of 33 interviews, 32 have been engaged in face to face one-to-one sessions, while one agreed to a telephone interview session. The remaining two requested a joint interview on the basis that they both belonged to the same organisation. The languages that were used were the preferred language of the respondents resulted in a large mixture of Malay and English languages. To be precise, approximately a third of them favoured English, whereas all the others remaining preferred Malay which is the national language of Malaysia, or a mixture of both (only 11 out of 33 opted for English). A careful process of translation was then been undertaken for these participants and this process has been done based on the personal interpretations of the researcher as the main instrument of the data analysis.

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Each interview was conducted using the same process of introduction, focusing on a brief discussion of the research and the participants’ important role within it. Participants were always notified verbally and in writing of their right to remove themselves and their data from the research at any point if they wished so, and were guaranteed anonymity and confidentiality with regards to their own identity and that of their organization. There was even an occasion where a respondent requested to go off-record on some cases of sensitive issues that he revealed to me, triggered by the notion that respondents have the freedom to respond to questions and develop ideas in their own terms and in their own words. The interview schedule includes ad-hoc questions that have been used to probe and expand topics that arise during the interview sessions. This included responses to the set questions, but importantly, also to issues that arose in the course of the interview which I did not anticipate prior to the interview.

The semi-structured interview sessions have been divided into two parts in relation to the objectives of the study, but this has not been done sequentially or in a formal structured way. The first part is focusing on respondents’ reported experiences and their perceptions towards the importance of this research attempt (refer to the findings in Chapter 4) while the second part is focusing on identifying the important risks and safety issues relevant within the event management industry in Malaysia (refer to the findings in chapter 5 and 6). The recursive approach (Veal, 2006) was adopted as in most cases the informants were allowed to speak freely and willingly on their own with minimum interference from the researcher. But I also combined open-ended questions to elicit free responses with focused questions for probing and prompting. The interview schedule (refer Appendix VII) was used as a guide to ensure that the expected information or topic of interest is covered, meaning in most cases the questions asked were not in a particular sequential order. It was in the later part of data analysis that important themes were selected and analysed by leaving out what seemed to be less significant ones.

The in-depth interview is one type of interview that is common to case study in which the interviewer “can ask key respondents about the facts of a matter as well as their

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opinions about events” (Yin, 2009, p.107). The study’s research objectives can only be accomplished through the informants’ experiences and their perceptions towards the researched subject area. Interviewing was also important to describe the current situation of their practice on risks and safety as well as obtaining their evaluation of current practice. Stake (2004) argued that the best interviews are those that can get at description, perception and evaluation.

I have to admit that my interviewing at first wasn’t good, it was too wordy, but it was not unproductive. The following illustrate some wordy questions that were asked in my interview sessions mostly at the beginning phase of data collection:

“Ok, in your opinion who are normally exposed, most exposed to the hazards of risk and safety in your events? Who are normally most exposed to it?”

“I want to talk about the responsibility… responsibility and reliability. When you organise events, being the event organiser yourself… or when you asked the EO [meaning: event organiser] to organise the event for you for example, the safety concern or risk management and safety aspect will come under whose jurisdiction? I mean will come under whose responsibility? Whose will be liable for that if anything happens in your events? Normally who will be responsible for it?”

“Ok, other than that… are there any other major risks involved in organising events, other than the safety of the VIP’s? What are other things that you can recall, that you can be aware of? I mean the risks involve… that involving safety in organisation of events…

other than that I mean, other than that?”

However, it did improve later on when I became quite used to those sessions and succeeded in being more precise towards later interview sessions. It really helped that the interview was field-tested in the preliminary phase. Although it was a semi-structured style it included as many open-ended questions as possible, and some of the questions were quite specific such as questions related to their perceptions about the importance of risks and safety in their job, as well

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as questions pertaining to important risk factors that they anticipated in their daily job of managing and organising festivals, meetings and other events. Some participants provided me with a ‘vicarious experience’ in narrating their story and in most of the interview sessions, I had a feeling that my respondents would always have ‘something’ they want to say that is relevant to my inquiry. It is their perceptions, views, opinions and experience that matter most. So, it is up to me to probe those ‘somethings’ from them, and most often, they gave me those ‘somethings’.

3.6 Data Collection Procedures