Interviews

In this project I also used semi-structured interviews (Rubin & Rubin, 2011). Semi-structured interviews are valuable ways to “understand themes of the lived everyday world from the subject’s own perspective” (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008, p. 27).

I developed questions around broad themes based on a review of the literature and analysis of government plans. These themes were greatly enhanced by observations and interactions from shadowing sessions. After all, interviews should help “explain and put into a larger context what the ethnographer sees and experiences” (Fetterman, 2010, p.

40). While these themes and questions were used, the semi-structured approach adopted also allowed space for new themes and questions to emerge during the interviews.

Given the, at times, overwhelmingly high amount of street-level work at the DCA, conducting semi-structured interviews became challenging, especially with front- line employees and supervisors; this might have negatively affected the number of interviews I was able to conduct. Nonetheless, over the whole period of the fieldwork, I was able to arrange and conduct three semi-structured interviews with two front-line supervisors and seven interviews with six different front-line employees. Additionally, I conducted three semi-structured interviews with three senior directors at the DCA. I was also able to conduct three interviews with senior eGovernment strategists. Only one front-line employee at the DCA agreed to have the interview voice recorded; the rest preferred that I record their answers in writing. Interviews lasted from approximately 20 minutes with some participants and up to 80 minutes for others; the majority of interviews lasted about one hour. All three interviews with eGovernment strategists were voice recorded; one interview last about 110 minutes and the other two last about 50 minutes each.

At Tracer offices I conducted nine interviews, five of which were with office managers, the remaining four interviews were equally divided between office front-line staff members and office owners, who all also worked as back-end Tracers at the same time. Office front-line staff members were difficult to interview mainly because office managers preferred that front-line staff members did not leave their posts. Office managers in these cases curtailed to some extent access to office front-line staff members. Nonetheless, this issue was remedied, first through extensive shadowing of some Tracer offices’ front-line staff members. Second, the fact that most office

managers I interviewed had extensive work experience in various roles in their offices enabled them to bring perspectives from other roles into the interview discussion. Only four out of the nine interviews were voice recorded as per participants’ preferences. The

remaining five interviews were recorded in writing. Interviews lasted from 40 minutes being the shortest up to 110 minutes for the longest interview among this group.

The remaining seven interviews were conducted mostly with citizens and expatriate workers who use Tracer offices as well as the DCA’s services. In the

sampling of citizens and expatriate workers, I sought to select participants from diverse backgrounds as much as possible. Overall, two expatriate workers from Sudan and Pakistan, respectively, were interviewed along with five Saudi citizens. Three, of the five citizens, were small business owners, one of whom had worked at a Tracer office previously. The remaining two were working professionals. Interviews lasted from 30 minutes to 105 minutes. Only four interviewees of this participant group consented to the use of voice recorder; the remaining three interviews were recorded in writing.

The sensitivity to the use of a voice recorder was indeed a salient issue when it came to interviews. It can be attributed to a lack of trust. While voice recording is a way to preserve some of the context of the interview; participants preferences not to use one had to be respected. To remedy this issue, I tried to record responses as accurately as possible with the cooperation of participants who facilitated the process by trying to speak slowly and allowing me time to write down their responses.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed in Arabic, the spoken language in Saudi Arabia. Maintaining data in its original language helps to preserve its integrity; especially since translation is a situated and subjective process that might indeed change from one translator to another (Temple, 2005). Given this, I strove to translate as accurately as possible into English only the parts I used in the thesis; being a native of the context of the study and acquiring an appreciation of the different layers of meaning

as I carried out the fieldwork, positioned me favourably for this task. The total word count of all transcribed and typed interviews is 103,486.

Stage Duration No. days

Stage 1 21 December 2016 until 15 January 2017 26 days

Stage 2 28 March 2017 until 26 June 2017 90 days

Stage 3 01 September 2017 until 21 September 2017 21 days

Total 137 days

Table 2: Stages of data collection.

Participant group Sub-groups (by occupation, category) Number of participants Number of interviews Government employees Front-line staff 6 7 Supervisors 2 3 Directors 3 3 Senior eGov strategists 3 3

Tracer offices Office staff 2 2

Office managers 5 5 Office owners 2 2 Members of the public Citizens 5 5 Expatriate workers 2 2 Total 30 32