DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES

For this qualitative study, three main data collection techniques were used, namely interviews, document analysis and field notes. An explanation of each of the techniques is discussed below.

4.5.1 Interview

Interviewing is a common and powerful instrument of data collection technique employed by researchers to understand their fellow humans (Fontana & Frey 2005; Ghauri &

Grønhaug 2005) and a reality of specific phenomenon investigated (Denzin & Lincoln 2008), particularly in conducting a qualitative research (Myers & Newman 2007; King &

Horrocks 2010). The purpose of the qualitative interview is to contribute to a body of knowledge that is conceptual and theoretical and based on the meanings of life experiences valued by the interviewees (DiCicco-Bloom & Crabtree 2006). This is because the interview provides a unique opportunity to discover information which is rich and complex in nature from individual interviewees (Cavana, Delahaye & Sekaran 2001) and assists the researchers to interpret interviewees’ rich thoughts on issues investigated (Ticehurst &

Veal 2000).

Being a qualitative researcher in this thesis requires the researcher to explore and describe multiple views of research participants from five sectors including technology-based entrepreneurs, academics and government officers. This is because interview participants are more likely as meaning makers as interpretation of interviews are derived from their talk, emotions and feelings (Ticehurst & Veal 2000; Warren 2001). In this thesis, the employment of in-depth, semi-structured interviews is the key instrument to discover multiple realities amongst participants (Stake 1995).

Semi-structured interviews generally have an overall structure and direction, but allow a lot of flexibility to include unstructured questioning (Hair, Money, Samouel & Page 2007).

This is because the conduct of this interview is structured around a set of predetermined open-ended questions and other questions emerging from the conversation between the researcher and interviewees (DiCicco-Bloom & Crabtree 2006). The researcher prepared several questions beforehand by using an interview guide, but there is a need for

improvisation, specifically to probe for additional information (Green 2005; Myers &

Newman 2007).

For this thesis, the semi-structured interview is chosen based on several justifications.

First, it offers flexibility compared to structured interview style that imposes a predefined pattern of analysis by relying on a standard and limited set of questions (Iacobucci & Rosa 2010). That means the semi-structured interviewer will use defined dimensions only and will explore and probe the interviewee into several factors within the themes of the research (Johnson 1990; Sekaran 2003). This enabled the researcher to cover many aspects of research interest due to the nature of flexibility and autonomy offered by this method, specifically to pose new questions during the interview and seek further information (Green 2005). Additionally, in line with Bryman (2008), semi-structured interviews also allowed participants to be more flexible in expressing their views and responses to the researcher’s queries.

In conducting an interview for this thesis, the researcher would normally begin with several common questions that were based on his interview outline. For example, when the researcher conducted an interview amongst entrepreneurs, the researcher would be initially asked the respondents on their motivations to be an entrepreneur and their initial business start-up history. By listening to their initial answers the researcher would determine what questioned to be asked next, or whether it is important to probe additional information till all questions on the interview outline were covered (Maykut & Morehouse 1994). Then, before the researcher concluded the interview session, he would ask the participant again to summarise the main factors that they perceived would help technology entrepreneurs to sustain in the business.

Secondly, the semi-structured interview is suited to exploratory study where the issues of interest are highly personal or ill-defined to a specific individual (Thomas 2004). This interview type allows the researcher to ask new questions during the interview session in order to explore and shed new light on relevant themes of the research framework.

Interestingly, the employment of the in-depth semi-structured interview also enabled the researcher to investigate deeply into social and personal matters, specifically for an individual interview as the respondents would be able to express their views without any influence from others (DiCicco-Bloom & Crabtree 2006). For instance, the perception of

different factors that might help Bumiputera technology-based entrepreneurs would be different for each interview and by having a one-to-one interview with the interviewees;

they would feel more comfortable and confident to express their views and critiques upon the interview questions. Some of them would also ask this researcher to turn off the interview recording when they want to express a very personal story or experience. Yet, from this process, the researcher would be able to understand further the nature of the study undertaken and uncover intriguing puzzles.

Thirdly, the employment of semi-structured interview also provides opportunities to change the words but not the meaning of questions posed to participants (Barriball &

While 1994). This is because each interviewee is expected to have had unique experiences or stories to tell (Stake 1995), and thus, a different way of questioning styles and content would be customised based on interviewee feedback. The questions drafted for the interview may need to be worded differently to different respondents in order to generate the same meaning for all respondents and depend on the specific context of each researcher-participant interaction. The employment of semi-structured interviews is deemed suitable for exploring views from various groups of participants in this thesis on a specific topic. The researcher used phrases or words appropriate to different participants, for example, in exploring the motivation theme of an entrepreneur, the researcher would use the words ‘motivate’, ‘inspire’ or ‘goal’ and then probe more to further explore the theme. Thus, the researcher would not use language requiring the interviewees to grapple to understand with jargon or technical terms.

Lastly, the employment of semi-structured interviews also assisted the researcher to explore and acquire opinions and perceptions of respondents regarding complex and sometimes sensitive or contentious issues (Barriball & While 1994; Thomas 2004;

Creswell 2009) such as the special treatment received by Bumiputera entrepreneurs as compared with non-Bumiputera entrepreneurs and the influence of political connection in operating a business. In dealing with this kind of question, the researcher would use a

‘wait and ask’ strategy where the sensitive or complex questions would be asked of the participants when the issues were raised by them while expressing their views. This strategy seemed to be an effective method as it happened many times during the interview session. Further, some of them might also give their feedback on this matter without requiring the researcher to ask direct questions.

4.5.2 Document Analysis

An analysis based on textual materials or documents provides relevant research data in a qualitative research (Eriksson & Kovalainen 2008), specifically through the usage and examination of secondary data (Cavana et al. 2001). This process is conducted by using either published or unpublished printed materials such as company reports, faxes and newspaper articles (Silverman 2010). Yin (2009) suggests that relevant documents are viewed as important investigatory tools which researchers could use in order to make inferences about events and to provide further understanding of the subjects or participants understudied.

The employment of this technique for data collection process in this thesis is based on several justifications. First, the analysis of relevant documents (e.g. reports and government policies) helped the researcher to build a better understanding in conducting this research (Myers 2009), in which these documents could provide significant and important insights into an issue understudied (Merriam 2002). For example, the analysis of government’s policy documents such as the Tenth Malaysian Plan could afford the researcher a better understanding of the inspiration of the Malaysian government towards the development of Malaysian Bumiputera entrepreneurs.

Second, the application of relevant company documents such as company profiles and product descriptions might be able to portray the historical background of a company as well as to provide a record of decisions taken by the company (Rowlinson 2004). Indeed, the utilisation of company documents has provided relevant information on a company such as the directorship, nature of business and product offerings (Thomas 2004). These documents were obtained by the researcher either from some entrepreneurs who were kind enough to give their company documents, or the researcher bought some company profiles from the Companies Commission of Malaysia (CCM) for RM13 (approximately AUD4) per document. Despite these documents being relatively inexpensive, the documents were regarded as a good quality data because companies understudied usually make efforts to document their business profiles (Thomas 2004). Nevertheless, a few companies were not able to provide their company documents to the researcher because some were new in the industry and some mentioned that this data was confidential.

The third justification for using documents was that documents and records are generally regarded as non-reactive, unobtrusive sources of data (Thomas 2004). This is because the documents utilised in this thesis have been produced before or during the research and thus their contents obviously cannot have been influenced by the researcher’s presence or by the existence of a research investigation. Interestingly, the preparation of this thesis coincided with many changes in Malaysia’s socioeconomic landscape, especially with the appointment of Najib Razak as the new Prime Minister of Malaysia in April 2009, which has led to further changes to the Malaysian government’s policy documentations such as the Liberalisation Policy and the introduction of the Malaysian New Economic Model (NEM). All these mentioned documentations had opened up to broaden the investigation on issues associated with the development of Malaysian Bumiputera entrepreneurs, particularly in the technology-based industries.

Nevertheless, due to tremendous sources of information available from this method, the researcher had to set some criteria for determining the validity of the data for the research.

This criteria could help researchers to avoid drawbacks of using this method, such as the collected data becoming obsolete or irrelevant and not able to meet specific needs of the research under study (Cavana et al. 2001). As a result of this, in order to ensure the quality assurance for this thesis, the researcher followed Forster’s (2006) five practical stages in accessing and analysing documents (specifically company documents) which comprised:

(a) accessing relevant documents, (b) checking for the authenticity, (c) understanding the documents, (d) analysing the data, and lastly (e) utilising the data.

4.5.3 Field Notes

Field notes are a descriptive record of conversations and events experienced by researchers in conducting research (Thomas 2004), specifically to record their impressions and initial thoughts throughout the in-depth interview process (Bryman & Bell 2007). The application of field notes in a qualitative research has been recommended by Myers (2009) whereby a researcher should write filed notes alongside the use of different kinds of recording devices to collect interview data. This is because these notes could be used as a source of what a researcher was thinking and feeling on what has been implemented during an interview (Myers 2009) besides making any additional commentary that might help the researcher in analysing the data in the latter stage. Indeed, notes taken by the researchers

would help them to specify clearly key aspects or themes emerged during the data collection processes (Bryman 2008).

In collecting the research data for this thesis, the researcher wrote the field notes while conducting the interview and listening back to recorded interviews (see Appendix B). The contents of the field notes were the name of interviewees, the data and time of interview and main contents of responses received from the interviewees (Flick 2009). The researcher also wrote any additional note like a memo, even after the conversation has taken place once he recalled any data considered relevant to the issue under study (Thomas 2004). Moreover, by taking important notes of the interview contents, it allowed the researcher to identify any emerging themes that had been emphasized by interviews and may also be considered as rich source of complementary data. Flick (2009) also mentioned that the production of reality in text starts with the taking of field notes from the research conducted. Therefore, the field notes taken by the researcher in this thesis were organised and indexed systematically in order to make aware of certain things which were important and should not be ignored during the analysis of the raw data collected (Payne & Payne 2004).