Negotiating access

Access to participants at the university to which I am affiliated was facilitated by the

contact I had with the MBA director and staff at the career office. However, most

MBAs in Argentina are part-time, meaning that participants change jobs at different

points in time, and universities do not keep records of this, either when they are

students and even less when they graduate. As participants for this study needed to be

in the first months of a new role, it was difficult to identify these individuals who were

‘just starting’ a new job. The process for identifying participants started with staff

working with the MBA programme or at the university’s career office who might have

‘heard’ that someone was changing jobs and hence introduced me to this person.

sending a general email to their graduates. Hence, the first contacts were aided by

university staff and the remaining through snowballing among participants.

At another university, I contacted a professor whom I had met at an academic

conference and she introduced me to the person in charge of career development for

the full time MBA at this university. This person introduced me and sent the invitation

for participation in the research to the 2009 graduates who were employed and two

replied expressing their interest in participating. I started collecting data from

participants from these two universities and after five months I had seven participants,

but the staff at these universities was unable to find any more graduates who complied

with the selection criteria. I contacted the Professor at the second university again as

the person in charge of career development explained that I was likely to find more

potential participants from the part-time MBA programme. So, the Professor

introduced me to the MBA director of the part-time MBA programme and he was able

to provide me the contact of potential participants.

I then decided to expand the number of universities included in the study, to ensure

numbers of participants and to increase the richness of the research. I selected the

universities by looking for the other two universities whose MBA programmes are

among the top ranked in Argentina. The four total MBA programmes are all

internationally accredited and belong to the following institutions: IAE, UdeSA,

UTDT and UCEMA. In order to contact the remaining two universities, I attended the

‘MBA forum’, which is an event where universities present their programmes to

prospective students, as I expected MBA directors to be there. At this event, I

introduced myself to one director, and got the director of the programme at my

university to introduce me to another one. Once the contact was made, I explained the

believe that having a university affiliation had mixed effects in terms of accessing

other universities. On the one hand, it facilitated introductions. On the other, MBA

directors were concerned about me extracting data that would be used to improve the

MBA programme at my university. I addressed this by assuring confidentiality of data

(Appendix 3). At the same time, they were concerned about the experience their

graduates would go through and this was addressed by the principle of informed

consent and the ethical guidelines followed which will be explained in section 4.2.6.

Once these contacts were made, the challenge to identify graduates in transition was

similar to that at the first university. Most directors provided me with the email

addresses of graduates they thought had changed recently and I contacted them on

their behalf. (Please see Appendix 4 with the contact email sent to potential

participants). I sent out 107 emails, to which I received 28 responses from graduates

who complied with the criteria and were interested in finding out more about the

research project. I had conversations over the phone with 27 of the potential

participants who had provided their phone numbers and a suggested time to call, of

whom 25 agreed to participate and two declined because they were too busy and were

concerned they would not be able to comply with the research process. One other

potential participant also complied with the criteria but after explaining the research

process to him by email, he was also concerned about not having enough time, so was

not included. There was another graduate who started participating and the first

interview was undertaken. However, after leaving the premises where the interview

took place I was mugged, which resulted in the theft of the recording of the interview.

I contacted the participant explaining the situation to him and providing my apologies

for this random, unfortunate event. I afterwards wrote a summary of the interview and

summary nor got involved in the remaining of the research project, even after I

contacted him a couple of times by email and one through telephone to encourage his

participation. Hence, he was removed from the sample. So, 24 participants comprise

the total sample and Table 4.1 shows the distribution by university.

Table 4.1: Participants’ distribution by university

Universities IAE UdeSA UTDT UCEMA

Number of participants 6 9 2 7

In terms of the interaction with participants the affiliation may have had an impact on

the research process, though this was not detected. For example, participants

graduating from my university might have felt that they were contributing through this

research to their institution and this increased their willingness to participate.

However, there was great enthusiasm from participants belonging to all universities as

this was a topic in which they were interested and so wanted to contribute knowledge.

Additionally, the MBA directors of their universities had asked them to contribute to

the study and since they were grateful for their educational experience, they felt

positive about participating.