Ethical considerations

According to King and Horrocks (2010) social researchers are obliged to treat the people they investigate ethically and protect their welfare. With this in mind, the following sub-sections illustrate the ethical considerations related to this research project. These considerations follow the Handbook of Research Ethics of the University of Gloucestershire (Research Ethics: A Handbook of Principles and Procedures) which was approved by the University Research Degrees Committee in September 2008.

4.4.1 Informed consent

The participants of this study were invited to participate in the present research project.

They were informed about the background of the study and if they agreed that their participation would consist of participating in an approximately 60 minute interview (personal, telephone or Skype) where they would be asked questions related to their experience as a downsizing survivor.

Participants were reminded that their participation was voluntary and that they not had to answer any of the questions, which they do not wish to. They were informed that they could withdraw at any time and that in such a case all information pertaining to them would be destroyed at a certain point. Participants were also reminded that the interview would be audio recorded and transcribed afterwards if this was acceptable, otherwise written notes would be made. In addition to that they were assured that the interview would only be used for research purposes and that everything would be anonymous and kept confidential (King and Horrocks, 2010).

Prior to the start of the interview, participants were provided with the informed consent form (see Appendix D) with the request to sign it if they agreed with the content and if they do not have further questions. The researcher also signed the informed consent form and thereby confirmed that he had explained to the individual survivor the nature and purpose of this study and answered any questions raised. A copy of the consent form was subsequently provided to the participant. As all participants are adults and no one of them was disabled or sick this assured that their understanding was not impaired in a particular way and that they could give full informed consent.

4.4.2 Confidentiality and anonymity

King and Horrocks (2010) argued that it is the researcher’s duty to respect the anonymity and privacy of the participants. Therefore, neither the organization’s nor the participant’s names were mentioned in the research study. When direct quotes were used in the text, any identifying information was removed in order to protect their identity. In order to distinguish between the quotes from the different participants in the text, each participant was allocated a number, instead of their real name (see also sub-section 4.2.4.1). To further assure confidentially the transcription of the interviews was done only by the researcher himself, so that no other people had access to the raw material. This was also explained to participants prior to the interview.

The raw material obtained from the interviews and all other electronic files related to the data collection were stored in a password-protected file on the researcher’s computer. This ensures that only the researcher, but no other people can access the material (King and Horrocks, 2010). Additionally, the raw material was backed up on an external hard drive, in order to minimize the risk of data loss. Hard copies such as print outs or field notes were stored at a secure place in the researcher’s office at home, and therefore were not accessible for others. Although, the information gained from this study might be published in research journals or presented at research conferences, participants’ identity will always be kept strictly confidential. Moreover, all material, either electronic or paper based will be deleted when no longer required for research purposes.

4.5 Summary

This chapter has illustrated the methodology and methods which were used for the current research project. It was shown that an interpretivist stance on social research provides a more holistic approach to explore survivors’ experience than a positivistic stance. Moreover, it was shown that semi-structured interviews provided a suitable method to collect the empirical material, as they allow both, flexibility to deal with the complexity of the topic, and a certain amount of structure, with the potential to achieve comparable results. The methods which were used to analyse the interview material were also outlined in this chapter. It was illustrated how the interviews were transcribed and how the text was systematically analysed. This included a detailed description of how meaning units were identified and how the transcripts were searched for relevant sentences and phrases in order to discover the essence of a survivor’s story.

In a further sub-section of this chapter, the theoretical lenses to explain and interpret the findings were outlined. It was shown, that a two-step approach, which combines description and interpretation is a useful concept to gain an in-depth knowledge about the phenomenon of downsizing survival. In the first step the themes were explained in light of previous research. In the second step, sensemaking theory from Weick (1995) was applied as a prism to interpret the material obtained from the interviews. In the final sections of this chapter the process to assess the trustworthiness of this study was outlined and ethical considerations such as confidentiality and anonymity were discussed.

In the following chapter the findings from this study will be outlined.