Pilot Study

The pilot was undertaken to test 4 main objectives:

1. The overall operationalisation of this part of the research design including the transcription of recordings, sampling and ethical considerations such as confidentiality, security of data and on going anonymity of individual participants;

2. The simplicity of the language used in the questions in terms of the population understanding what was being asked for;

3. The transcribed answers reflected what had been asked and contained sufficient data within the context of each category, and,

4. To identify any other specific themes in order to assist the analysis in the main study.

30 participants, 5 for the pilot study and 25 for the main study, were asked to take part in a semi-structured interview regarding levels of resident participation in joint action that was beneficial to their community. The participants were made up from 20 male and 10 female residents aged between 21 and 76, with a mean age of 47. The largest ethnic group was White – 21; Mixed – 4; Asian – 2; Black – 2 and, Chinese – 1. The interviews were conducted at a venue close to the selected population. The venue was comfortable and the researcher provided refreshments by way of courtesy rather than inducement. Before interviews were conducted, participants were advised that they

could withdraw from the research at any time, and that in such an event their data would not be used. Participants were also told that the data would be kept confidential, and that they would not be personally identified or linked with their responses. Participants were asked to sign a consent form, and were given an information sheet that outlined the process, ethical issues such as, data storage and use, consent and contact details for the researcher and supervisor (Appendix C). Interviews lasted approximately 25 minutes. The lengths of interviews varied, but were all between 20 minutes and 30 minutes. Interviews were tape recorded with permission from participants and subsequently transcribed. A prepared list of questions was used to provide consistency to the

interview process (Appendix B). The investigation focussed on the participants’ views, beliefs and expectations of their community’s actions in areas of relationships,

information participation and trust, shared responsibility and collective action in times of need. The questions included: “Can you describe your community in terms of size, closeness and make up including for instance, families, friends, neighbours?” This question aligned to Community Network Structure and the informal networks that emerge with communities. By describing this aspect of community behaviour,

participants would provide an insight into whether their community had network bonds in place that would be essential for Community Efficacy to be effective (Wang and Kapucu, 2007, p. 59). “Can you describe the level of participation by local residents in community events?” The participation element of this question is tapping into the construct of Social Capital and specifically a community’s ability to organise and attend events where they share information and experiences. Furthermore they each see one another as supporting the community and endorsing their belief and sense of community (Ohmer, 2010, p. 6). “What makes you believe your community would assist each other in preparing for an emergency?” This example reflects the dimension of Community Capacity where a sense of shared responsibility would cause a community to act in

response to the welfare of another member. The belief that they could act together to ensure the welfare of community members would be a strong indicator of Community Efficacy. (Goodman et al, 1998, p. 264.) The remaining questions were distributed across the three dimensions to ensure that the participants had adequate stimulus to talk about their beliefs and experiences within their community and their perceptions on how the community would act together when facing an emergency issue or challenge. At the end of the interview each participant was asked to comment about how the felt about the interview. Feedback from participants was positive in that they understood what was being asked; they did not feel pressurised in answering any of the questions and could relate the questions to their own community. From the researchers’

perspective, the process of interviewing including ethical issues, recording and transcribing and gaining rich data on which to base the main study were all positive. The transcriptions were accurate and contained good examples and descriptions of community actions contained within the 3 main constructs. The 6 original themes were confirmed by resident’s responses. A further 2 themes were identified from both the pilot transcripts and the literature. This is consistent with Boyatiz’s (1998) description of an inductive approach to theme development where themes emerge from data obtained from data obtained the researcher’s own work. Four extra questions were developed to investigate the newly identified themes. Table 3. below contains the 2 new themes identified from the pilot transcripts.

Table 3. Construct, Dimension and Themes (amended) Construct Dimension Theme

Perceived Community Capacity

community network structure

- Informal networks comprise web of relationships with friends, neighbours, work associates.

- Formal networks associated with agencies and organisations.

- Relationships,Voluntary & Obligatory.

social capital

- Information, reciprocity and trust, aggregate of community resources.

- Participation in formal and informal settings. - Increased odds of achieving results otherwise not

attainable.

community capacity

- Shared responsibility and welfare for community. - Collective competence and actions to confront situations.

The researcher was also able to identify example statements from the

respondents that would be useful in developing descriptions for the themes that would be used to analyse textual data in relation to the coding handbook and transcribed interview recordings. Examples are given below as an indication of some of the respondents’ replies. In describing events or meeting organised by local members of your community a participant provided the following response. “There are regular meetings and events in the community that I suppose give us a network of people that share information about the things that are happening in our community.” This would represent a community with a good network and communications infrastructure and would align well with the construct, community network structure and the theme, networks. When asked about the concept of trust within the theme of aggregate of resources in the community, one respondent replied, “I think little things like keeping spare house keys for the neighbours in case tradesmen need access” and “checking the house if they’re away for a holiday or something”. These statements suggest the

presence of elements of social capital and is highly representative of the theme, aggregate of resources, within the dimension social capital. In describing the kind of activities the community might under take in preparing for floods or severe

storms another participant stated “Likely activities might be moving pets to safer areas or seeing to the evacuation of elderly people to safer areas, perhaps a neighbour’s house that was higher up the street, out of the way of the flood water.” This statement supports the dimension, community capacity, but indicates strongly the theme, shared

responsibility and welfare, and in particular, welfare, in terms of moving livestock and evacuation of elderly. All 8 themes were matched with descriptive text taken from the pilot transcripts. This was further developed into a coding handbook that would assist raters in analysing transcripts in the main study (Appendix C). An additional use for the handbook was to improve rater reliability. The handbook consisted of each theme having a description or definition, guidance on the indicators of the themes and

examples of the themes taken from the pilot transcriptions. Boyatiz (1998) suggests that percentage agreement method is suitable when there are relatively few themes to be coded. Percentage agreement normally involves comparing the number of occasions when both coders agreed on the presence of a theme or code with the number of times that theme or coding was possible. The percentage agreement on presence variation is used where a theme is only of theoretical interest only and when a theme or code is present in the transcript. Whilst Boyatiz does not include guidance on what constitutes a relatively few number of themes, Hsiesh and Shannon (2005, p. 1279) identified coding and cluster structures in the range of 15 -20 clusters containing large numbers of codes with some examples containing more than 100 codes. Against these numbers, the researcher was confident that the percentage method would prove sufficient for examining the reliability of the 2 raters and the 8 themes. The raters were able to identify themes in the transcripts without resorting to assistance from the researcher.

They suggested some amendments regarding the wording of descriptions of the themes in the coding guide that were originally taken from the construct descriptions. Some of the descriptions were altered without affecting the context or meaning of the statement. Reliability was also tested using the manual percentage method and achieved a value of 90%