After the ethical approval of this research was given by the School Ethical Committee on May 28th, 2013, and in order to test the feasibility of the research design, I undertook a two-month pilot study (Kim, 2011; Sampson, 2004; Van Teijlingen and Hundley, 2002). In the pilot study, I conducted three face-to-face interviews with injured seafarers, one interview with a surviving family member, and other interviews with a ship operating manager (offshore support vessels), a crew manager (manning company for ocean- going vessels), a claim handler of P&I Club correspondent agent, two maritime judges and two lawyers. Telephone appointments were made before meetings, and I travelled around Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Shandong provinces. Meeting points were usually at public tea houses or offices, with one exception at my hotel room with the widow of a deceased seafarer.
The pilot study was conducted and guided by five sets of semi-structured interview schedules designed for (1) the victims, (2) the shipping and crew managers, (3) the P&I Club claim handler, (4) maritime lawyers and (5) maritime judges. The interview schedule with the victims focused on their experiences of the accident, experiences of claim processes, and the impact on their social life and health. With my knowledge and expertise as an
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assistant maritime lawyer, I designed the interview schedules for the professional interviewees according to their different roles in managing seafarers’ claims. The schedules for professional interviews covered the major aspects of organisational policy, procedures of claim management and their responses to current Chinese compensation legal systems. With my professional knowledge, I was able to establish an effective conversation with my interviewees to explore their claim management practices in-depth. When I had finished an interview, I assigned myself 3-4 days transcribing, reflecting on the interview process, and revising the interview questions.
Through the pilot study, I obtained an understanding of both victims’ experiences and the management of the workplace accidents and seafarers’ claims (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003; Seidman, 1998). Through analysing and comparing three victims’ interview accounts, I was gradually made aware of three potential stages in the claim process (see Figure 2), and a claim may either terminate at any stage or move on to next stage. Within the current legal framework, Stage 3 (judicial remedies) is the last resort for victims.
Figure 2: An overview of the claim process
In the previous literature, the majority of the discussion concerns victims’ experiences of workers’ compensation systems, which are equivalent to
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seeking remedies from administrative institutions (Stage 2 in Figure 2). In the work by Chinese legal scholars, the focus is usually the discourse of maritime jurisdiction (Stage 3 in Figure 2). However, in the pilot interviews with victims, I found that large parts of their accounts were related to compensation negotiation with crew agencies, and one claimant did not file her claim to any public institutions. This type of worker claimant was excluded by previous studies since such cases are not recorded formally. In my research, I found several seafarers simply withdrew from the claiming process, because of obstacles they could not overcome and the results of claim were unpredictable. This is another important effect of the harm existing in claim procedures and is often ignored by legal scholars due to the silence and invisibility of these seafarers.
In addition, there is little literature discussing organisational management of seafarers’ compensation claims. In the pilot study, I found this management process included (1) on-site management including mainly emergency medical service arranged by the shipowners’ agents and (2) follow-up management including further treatment in the seafarers’ home country, assessment of disability and compensation procedures. The following-up management stage usually involves four parties, seafarers or surviving families as claimants, manning companies as coordinators27, shipowners as compensators and P&I Clubs as employers’ liability insurers. According to the accounts of claim handlers, shipping and crew managers, most compensation claims are settled by negotiation and very few claims were finally filed to the court.
According to these findings in the pilot study, I made certain changes in my interview schedules: (1) in addition to the questions regarding formal claim experiences with public institutions of Work-related Injury Insurance and maritime courts, I added questions to provide more opportunities for victims
27 Sometimes, seafarers regard manning companies as direct obligators for
the compensation together with the shipowners. About the manning companies’ status, there are many controversies in the context of China, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
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to describe their negotiation experiences with their crew agencies and shipping companies; (2) considering the “waiving” experiences of victims, another interview question was added: why did they give up pursuing compensation.
At the end of my pilot, I refined my participant recruitment strategies. My initial plan was to access these seafarers using the records of law firm and maritime courts. This plan did work, but the performance was limited. Then I decided to apply five multiple strategies (see 3.2.4) to recruit my research participants, including establishing contacts with several administrators of seafarers’ cyber communities, contacting manning companies, and inquiring for injured seafarers’ information from my friends working in the shipping industry. The outcomes of a combined sampling strategy turned out to be satisfactory.
The acceptability of audio-recorded interviews to seafarers and surviving families was good. However, some claim handlers and managers refused the use of audio recording, which meant I had to take notes during and after the interview as soon as possible to minimise the loss of the data. Documentary collection requests, such as employment contracts and compensation agreements were acceptable by most seafarers during the pilot study. Some case files and legal judgements were collected based on my promise of confidentiality and anonymity. I applied computer assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDA) with Atlas.ti software to process the pilot data.
The benefits of the pilot study were that: (1) semi-structured in-depth interviews were proved to be a feasible and efficient research instrument in this study; (2) I was able to talor my interview guides to include victims’ experiences of negotiation with companies and why they decided to waive the claim; (3) through the pilot study, the participant recruitment strategies were improved significantly; (4) the pilot study also enhanced my confidence as a social science researcher, and improved my communication skills with seafarers and other shipping professionals
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