The South African (SA) Department of Labour (DoL) is a national department in government with provincial office in all nine SA provinces. Each province has a number of Labour Centres (LCs) established closer to communities to expedite service delivery according to the demographic size of the area and related profiling. The centres are staffed, among others, with personnel referred to as frontline staff members and Client Service Officers (CSOs), and their supervisors. Therefore, non-probability purposive sampling was used to select the participants for the study (De Vos, Strydom, Fouché and Delport, 2002). The sample was drawn from a population of frontline Client Service Officers (CSOs) and their supervisors, based in two Labour Centres according to the judgement of the researcher, because the sample was “composed of elements that contain the most characteristics, representative or typical attributes of the population that serve the purpose of the study best” (Grinnell and
Unrau, 2008; Monette, Sullivan and DeJong, 2005 cited in De Vos et al., 2002, p. 392). In addition, the frontline participants were selected on the basis of employment history of having served in the same position for two years and longer. Two provinces of DoL Labour Centres in Gauteng, Johannesburg, profiled as an urban setting and Mpumalanga, Emalahleni (Witbank) profiled as semi-rural were sampled. The study sampled two key informants each from the DoL head office Human Resources section and a representative from ProductivitySA, who is a research specialist. In the case of the key informants, their selection for participation in the study was informed by their mere official position in respect to policy formulation status.
However, the actual frontline participants turned out to be not necessarily the envisaged target of personnel stationed in only two Labour Centre offices, one in Emalahleni and the other in Johannesburg. The two offices remained the same but it was established that within themselves, there were extended services that have equal first-hand contact and frontline service provision to clients. Therefore, frontline staff comprise of the actual office staff, the mobile trucks and satellite office extensions of both offices and call centre personnel of the Johannesburg Labour Centre, in particular. In light of this discovery, the researcher sought for participants in these other extension areas as “the specific processes being studied were most likely to occur” in them (De Vos, Strydom, Fouché and Delport, 2002, p. 334).
Therefore, a total of 37 male and female with ages varying between 25 years and 60 years and older were interviewed and the breakdown according to location was: 16 CSO participants in JHB and 11 at Witbank. In the Johannesburg LC, there were four individual CSO participants, and two separate CSO groups composed of four and eight participants respectively. In Witbank, there were seven individual CSOs and four in a group. There were only two supervisor individual participants in Witbank and four in Johannesburg, plus a supervisor group of four participants in JHB.
Equally, purposive sampling was used to identify key informants, one individual from the DoL Head Office and one individual from ProductivitySA who were senior representatives in the DoL Human Resource section and research unit senior personnel from ProductivitySA respectively and the two participants, one from each organisation had more than two years’ office experience.
The DoL participants were heterogeneous in terms of their demographic profile as espoused by Rubin and Bobbie (2005) that purposive sampling must, among others, be a composition of individuals’ characteristics, attitudes, experiences, behaviours and many other attributes. Also, even though the DoL frontline population is large and would have been difficult and expensive to canvass, with purposive sampling, a sub-set of the population, namely the Johannesburg and Emalahleni Labour Centres with essentially the same variations that exist in the DoL population were sampled to avoid lengthy times needed to conduct the interviews and the extensive travelling to different areas (Rubin and Bobbie, 2005; Bless, Higson-Smith and Kagee, 2006).
The weakness of purposive sampling in the study was the small size of the sample selection. In addition, it turned out during the actual study that the there was a need to reshuffle the number of individual CSO and supervisor participants in Witbank and of CSO and supervisor group participants in Johannesburg and Witbank; and that changed the proportionate even number plan. The plan was to conduct two supervisor groups, one in Johannesburg and one in Witbank. But when the study was conducted, only one Johannesburg supervisor group composed of four participants could be interviewed. The plan for individual supervisor participants was to be four in each area and there were only two individual supervisor participants in Witbank that could avail themselves for the study and no group could be put together. The CSO plan was four individual CSO participants per area, and in Johannesburg four individual CSOs participated. However, there were seven CSO participants in Witbank, three of whom were employed by the DoL for less than two years. Three of the participants with less than two years of service in DoL were the first to volunteer to participate in the study and later three were added with four participants with more than two years of service in DoL employment participated. In terms of groups, in Johannesburg there were two CSO groups and one in Witbank. The one CSO group in Johannesburg attracted eight participants as opposed to the plan of four participants in a group. The additional CSO group was encouraged to enhance data collection in the absence of the supervisor group in Witbank. The above documented shifts from the original plan of the sample did not impact negatively on the data collection and or analysis and the findings but contributed positively to the study.