way of semi-structured interviews. Contacts that I had maintained within the planning
department of the University of North Eastern Argentina (UNNE) were considered well placed to help me orientate myself and gain access to relevant stakeholders. The approach sat well with me as I was aware of the need for sound professional perspectives on the planning and management of city regions to help make the transition towards sustainable development, and also aware of the perceived value of public participation within international development and town planning policy and parlance. Furthermore, having read some work related to post-structuralist philosophies on development, I not only considered myself as having an empathetic, community-oriented outlook with respect for poor and marginalised flood victims at the grassroots, but also genuinely believed they could better inform approaches to adaptation with their valuable insights. I realised that the legitimacy of the governance of a city region ought not to be taken for granted and that there were many, potentially competing, voices deserving to be heard with respect to flooding.
Positionality of the researcher through the research process and assuring methodological rigour
Following the choices of focus and research strategy to be taken for a study, decisions made at various stages of a study, such as the selection and implementation of research method(s) and decisions over how data is interpreted and presented, all impact upon the findings. So, as well as openness and due consideration of the positionality of the researcher towards the study population noted above, for a qualitative study to have cogency it also needs to have coherence and demonstrate that there has been methodological rigour throughout the research process (Morse, 2015). A study is more convincing, then, if the reader is able to have an appreciation of the positionality of the researcher with respect to how a study was actually undertaken. Such transparency helps reveal to the reader the stages at which the standpoint of the researcher could have had a significant bearing on study outcomes, and helps to show if there has been continual self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher to help avoid undue bias or skewness in the collection or interpretation of the data. Key stages at which decisions were made, i.e. the selection of participants, the conducting of the interviews/choice of style of questioning and the analysis of the data for this study, are considered briefly in turn below.
In regard to the selection of participants for the top-down phase of data selection, I
was aware that there can be a tendency of certain professionals to have compartmentalised perspectives in respect to roles and operational responsibilities for city planning and management (Escobar, 2010). My initial contact with associates within the planning department of UNNE, who I had known since 1999, led to me being introduced to contacts within planning departments in the four main administrative areas of Gran Resistencia. Having made initial contacts amongst professionals in municipal planning departments and water management authorities, I wished also to talk to other professionals who were not planners though who were nonetheless associated with the experience of flooding in their working lives in some regard such as through teaching flood victims at school or through involvement in social or health work responses. I also wished, where possible, to meet the mayors of municipal councils. So, initially, I decided to sample purposively to gather insights from urbanists who had been introduced to me through my academic associates in UNNE, though as the top-down phase proceeded along, I also, by way of a snowballing sampling process, identified others who I thought may have valuable perspectives on flooding. The bi-lingual voluntary research assistants were very helpful in this as they lived locally and were able to accompany me to the offices of a range of key stakeholders; in a sense, I had taken on board the spirit of co-generation of data espoused in the work of Escobar (2010) and Chambers (2017) and allowed the participants, to a certain degree, to engage in the management of the research process.
Whilst I acknowledge that it would be disingenuous to claim parity of those involved in the research process, especially since research assistants did not engage in the drafting of the initial research proposal, I certainly respected and welcomed input from the assistants as they were students or workers at university or college with an interest in the topic under investigation, knew the locality and had experience of flooding themselves. For the second phase of data collection amongst flood victims, other than the criteria already outlined within the thesis, the approach to selection was more random on a ‘door to door’ basis once a suitable and willing participant had been identified. In both data collection phases, I was mindful of the need to minimise selection bias or, at least, make some sort of partial correction for it (King, Keohane and Verba, 1994). A clear example of a shift in efforts was the recognition that there needed to be more female interviewees for the limited time remaining in Argentina.
However, a fairly equal representation of male to female participants was finally
achieved before departing for England.
With regard to qualitative research, there is a risk within the semi-structured interviewing that a researcher could bias a study and fail to give a faithful representation of participant views through either consciously or subconsciously imposing his or her own views upon the data collection process. As Freire (2013) had cautioned, even with good intentions, care needs to be taken not to attempt to speak for the research participants. So, having briefed the research assistants, care was taken not to prejudice the semi-structured interviews by ensuring there was no purposive seeking of alignment of views to those of the researcher or assistants and to ensure there was no use of questions that were too leading. There was, however, a guide to questioning to attempt to steer participants towards making responses that had relevance for the thesis. Care and judgement were exercised then to strike a balance between allowing the participant free reign to express what they wished, having read the statement regarding the purpose of the research and signed the consent form, and keeping the interview focused. Clearly, such skills are learned with experience, though the fact the study was self-funded gave further motivation to keep matters relevant.
With regard to qualitative research of an interpretivist nature, there is also a risk that the interpretation and distillation of the data collected is done in such a way that there is inadequate or unfair representation of participant views. In seeking to do justice to the opinions expressed, this part of the research process extended the overall time taken considerably. With a good grasp of Spanish and the benefit of the facility to pause and replay the digital recordings, all of the interviews were listened to carefully, transcribed and coded over many months. Once points considered salient to the thesis were plucked out, they were grouped and colour coded by hand and analysed in line with the outlined analytical framework relevant to adaptation. The process became a
‘labour of love’, with the twin motivations of enabling incorporation of views not normally included within policy documents and the desire to submit the study for a doctorate qualification keeping me going. Thankfully, the process was eventually completed. I recognise the value of testing for inter-rater reliability, i.e. the coding of the data by someone else in order to see if similar results were obtained (Morse, 2015).
However, given the vast amount of data, the costs would have been prohibitive and so
the work was done myself.