Data collection process

5.4.1 Access and recruitment of research participants

From 2010 to 2012, I visited Beijing three times in order to gain access to the field and conduct research and collect data. In 2010, I stayed in Beijing for three months from June to September, in order to negotiate access rights and begin a pilot study. I had an advantage. My family’s social network enabled contact with the senior HR manager from SOE Bank, Beijing Branch. The HR manager agreed to assist in the distribution of online questionnaires by using their internal emailing system. However, I have no access to this email system. It was made clear to me that it was against the regulations to provide an ‘outsider’ with access to the internal system, but apart from this the HR manager agreed to be as helpful as he could, to be interviewed, and to enable access to employees who would have the option of completing my questionnaire.

Gaining the same level of access to MNC Bank was more difficult because I did not have the same pre-established links with people inside the company. I began by contacting one of the customer relations officers, hoping to gain the contact details

of the HR manager through her. She agreed to introduce me to their HR manager from the beginning. However, she then said that the HR manager had been sent to Shanghai to take over a colleague’s post. The customer relations officer then suggested she take the questionnaire and be an interviewee herself. Faced with a situation hardly ideal, I made further use of my family’s social network to acquire the contact details of the assistant president of MNC Bank, Beijing Branch, who was instrumental in helping to distribute questionnaires through their internal emailing system. Nevertheless, not many who responded to the questionnaire agreed to be interviewed afterwards. I tried to employ the snowball method during interviews with the few who did, but, despite my optimistic expectations,

employees from MNC Bank were not inclined to open up to ‘outsiders’. They seemed very concerned about confidentiality. Most of the interviewees refused to identify potential interview subjects because they were worried that information about, for example, their salary or future career plans, would find its way to their colleagues. In MNC Bank, monthly income is confidential and mostly based on sales performance. SOE Bank’s salary system is mostly based on a set system according to one’s highest degree, length of employment in a certain post and length of employment in the bank. Thus competition between employees is relatively high in MNC Bank compared with SOE Bank. Each employee has their own customer base and their own personal salary only known to themselves and payroll.Because of this, they were less willing to disclose personal information in order to help someone from the outside gain access to more participants.

After failing to recruit enough participants from MNC Bank on my first field trip to Beijing, I decided to adopt a different strategy during the second stage of data collection. I decided to shift from attempts to gain official access to a more personal approach. I began to take greater advantage of my social network, and was able to recruit participants through friends. In this way, I found the participants were more relaxed and more likely to open up to me and talk more about their actual thoughts and feelings during interviews.

5.4.2 Data collection process

The pilot study was carried out in July and August of 2010. I conducted

questionnaires and interviews with friends who work in state-owned, private and multinational banks. None of them worked in MNC Bank or SOE Bank. The pilot survey was instrumental in helping me to make corrections to the design of the questionnaire. By doing pilot interviews, it was possible to test the time the interview would take, identify optional responses and the advantages and

disadvantages of alternative structure of questioning and technical considerations concerning the use of a digital recorder.

Primary data collection took place across two periods: from January 2011 to the end of February 2011, and during the first three month of 2012. During the first period, I collected most of the data from SOE Bank, whereas only 10 questionnaires and four interviews were managed with people from MNC Bank. That is why I went

back to Beijing in 2012 the second time and tried to recruit more participants from MNC Bank; to balance the two research sites. Eventually, the whole process of data collection resulted in 92 questionnaires and 32 interviews. All of the questionnaires were distributed through email and created using online questionnaire software. Interviews were conducted in two ways: face-to-face, and by telephone. All of the interviews were tape-recorded after permission was given by the participants. All of the interviews were transcribed in Mandarin Chinese. The next section

reflexively analyses the methods used as part of the data collection process, i.e. recruitment of participants and different forms of interviews.