Epistemological Reflexivity

According to Willig to be reflexive epistemologically means to ‘reflect upon the assumptions (about the world, about knowledge) that we have made in the course of research’ (Willig 2008 p.10). These assumptions appear most prominently in key methodological decisions throughout the research process including formulation, planning and implementation. To reflect on these assumptions explicitly issues of design, data collection, and analysis which arose in the process of adopting a mixed research approach are discussed below.

Using Newman et al.’s (2003) typology of research purposes, the goal of this study was to contribute to a growing strand of research on the work and life of seafarers by exploring cruise sector seafarers’ social representation of their own working lives. The objectives were to explore and describe attitudes of a sample Filipino cruise sector seafarers’ towards a range of occupational, organisational and non-work issues to reveal shared and holistic viewpoints. Chapter Three showed that previous studies have largely focused to the issues related to workers’ experience on-board ships but less attention has been given on the issues they face before and after their temporary

employment. There has been a tendency to view seafarers’ work and life at sea as independent of their social contexts on shore. Bearing in mind the relevance of these concerns to seafarers, there was a need to consider how the various aspects of their working lives, inside and outside the ship, relate to each other. The present study was an initial attempt to fill this gap in the literature. The focus on Filipino seafarers was both analytical and practical. Even though cruise companies can recruit workers from all over the world, Filipino seafarers are one of the largest groups of employees by nationality and arguably sought-after because of a positive reputation particularly as service workers in cruise ships’ hotel department. As a Filipino myself, the decision to study cruise ship workers from the Philippines was a convenient and strategic choice.

A mixed methods study which combined Q-methodology and interviews was designed to address the general research question: How do cruise ship employees from the Philippines make sense of work issues within the broader context of their lives? Using Collins et al.’s (2006) guideline, the rationale for the integration of quantitative and qualitative data in this study data was ‘significance enhancement’ or to maximise the interpretation of results. The shared and holistic viewpoints revealed through the by- person factor analysis of Q-sorts were further supported, elaborated and illustrated by interview extracts. In the same manner, the arguments, narratives and descriptions of ‘real-life’ examples gathered from the short and long interviews were analysed and interpreted not on their own but in relation to the frames of reference identified through statistical analyses (Frels and Onwuegbuzie 2013). In the first section of this chapter, I recognised that other research designs were equally feasible but the use of Q and interviews were warranted given the focus on shared viewpoints and social representations. This choice of research design meant that generalisations were about the existing work-views/social representations. The downside is that the results cannot make claims on how these viewpoints are distributed in the larger population of cruise sector seafarers.

Finally, it is essential to report that the project did evolve over time. Approval from the School of Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee was given on 28th _{May 2013}

(p.294). The study was initially titled ‘The experience of working on cruise ships: Work identities

of Filipino cruise ship workers’. Studies of work identity or work-based self concepts

continue to be an enduring research area (e.g. Kirpal 2006; Walsh and Gordon 2008; Bothma 2011; Lloyd et al. 2011; DeBraine 2012) despite the ‘multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000 p.8) attached to the concept of ‘identity’. After a careful reading of literature on work and employment, particularly studies of cruise ship employees, it was apparent that a better understanding of the experience of seafarers may be arrived at by considering together the seafarers’ immediate work situation and the wider socio-cultural settings to which they belong (Beynon and Blackburn 1972; Watson 2012). As a consequence, I needed to re-orient the key concepts that inform the study. Although the study has moved away from work identities and towards social representations of working lives, the basic focus on the experiences of cruise ship workers has remained the same. After discussing the key concepts that frame the study and the research design, the results of Q-sort and interview analyses are presented in the next two chapter. In particular, Chapter Five introduces the four shared viewpoints that are identified in the data.

Four Shared Work-Views

Rather than formulating a monovocal account, good … analyses acknowledge the multiple and contested character of the interplay of discourses by showing how different discursive representations are built to interact with and ward off others

(Erica Burman 2003, emphasis added).

Making sense of employment experience in relation to one’s overall life varies from person to person. There are as many representations of working lives as there are workers. The way in which participants took a stance on each of the working life issues in the Q-sorting task, explained reasons for such opinion and offered personal stories to illustrate their point attest to the multitude of ways of understanding the lifeworld of cruise sector seafarers. The objective of this chapter is neither to present a ‘chaotic proliferation’ (Stainton-Rogers 1995 p.180) of individual representations nor to reduce such diversity into a ‘monovocal account’ (Burman 2003). Instead, the objective of this chapter is to describe a finite diversity of four shared viewpoints that emerged by analysing the pattern between Q-sorts. By combining data from the computed factor array/idealised Q-sort and comments/narratives from interviews, this chapter explicates the structure of work-views which are hereby labelled as the Good-fit, the

Troubled, the Professional and the Ambivalent. The intention of these labels is not to

oversimplify the viewpoint but to provide a concise and accessible grasp of the key ideas of each discursive representation (Stenner et al. 2003).

Following a qualitatively-driven style of interpretation in published studies using Q (e.g. Stenner and Stainton-Rogers 1998; Watts and Stenner 2005b; 2014), the four work-views will be presented in two ways. Firstly, the discursive elements of each

work-view are illustrated as a first-person narrative35 _{that encapsulates the}

interrelationship of all the opinion statements as configured in the factor array of each work-view36_{. These constructed narratives are the researcher’s re-construction an}

‘overall story’ about the working lives of cruise sector seafarers from viewpoints of the four groups identified among the participants. This narrative is not an ‘individual story’ but a ‘collective story’37 _{that turns the experience of cruise sector seafarers who hold}

similar viewpoints or ‘consciousness of kind’ (Richardson 1990 p.129) into an account.

These accounts were put together using the factor arrays and interview data for the relevant Q-set items. The constructed narrative was developed using abductive reasoning by first considering several plausible ways of ‘weaving’ stances on each of the 48 statements in order to arrive at the ‘best possible’ and ‘most logical’ version of a narrative of working life (Aliseda 2006) based on a particular viewpoint. In transforming the ‘quantitative’ factor array into a ‘qualitative’ / constructed narrative of working life it became necessary to use various ways of expressing ‘the story’ wherein the temporal ordering of what happened before, during and after they completed an employment contract is either explicitly or implicitly stated. It will be observed that only the constructed narratives for the Good-fits and the Troubleds have clear signposts that separate the before, during and after phases of cruise ship employment. In comparison, temporal ordering is implicit in the constructed narratives for the Professionals and the Ambivalents. It must be emphasised, however, that the socio-temporal dimensions are constant across these ‘composite stories’ because each narrative is composed from the Q-set statements that already invoke some temporal aspect of workers’ employment experiences (see Appendix 4). Since the factor array

35 _{Following Patterson (2008 p.37) the term narrative is hereby understood as: ‘texts which bring stories of} experience into being by means of the first person oral narration of past, present, future or imaginary experience.’ The definition is inclusive because it is more experience-focused than event-focused.

36 _{For the purpose of verification the table of factor arrays is in Appendix 9 pp.285-287. Alternatively, the}

idealised Q-sort for each work-views appear in Appendix 10, pp.288-291.

37 _{The conceptual transition from ‘individual story/representation’ to ‘collective story/social representation’} is described in Section 3.3 (pp.70-77) and briefly in Section 8.2.2 (pp.239-242). This conceptual transition is again addressed methodologically in Section 4.1.2 (pp.81-84).

was a composite of the Q-sorts of participants whose Q-sort loaded exclusively on that factor, it can be said that the structure of the factor array represents the shared viewpoint of the ‘definers’ and any other person who might align to the work-view under consideration.

Secondly, the viewpoints that differentiate each work-view from the three others are fully discussed and are further supported by comments from relevant participants38_.

After capturing the internal logic of each work-view as framed in the factor array, the next step is to attend to the relationship between work-views and describe how their positions are different or distinct from each other. Their differing opinions are emphasised to highlight the dis-alignment between work-views.

Statement rankings that inform an interpretive claim are cited in the narrative summary whenever relevant: The code “(s38: +3)” for example refers to Statement-38 which is placed in the +3 (agree) column in the idealised Q-sort of a relevant work-view group (e.g. Good-fit) work-view. The same coding system will be applied throughout the rest of the thesis. This signposting procedure is a practical and reflexive reminder that the researcher’s qualitative interpretation is always within the bounds of the factor array defined by a group of participants who have similar perspective. To close the chapter, some tentative explanations on what might explain differences in work-views are described.

38 _{These are the participants with Q-sorts that are significantly correlated to the work-view being described.} See Appendix 8, pp.282-284, for a list of participants who cluster under each factor/work-view.