Qualitative Data: Interviews & Questionnaire Comments

Qualitative data was gathered in the form of interview with university managers and comments from the questionnaires.

3.6.2.1 The Interview as a Research Method

The interview is a central component of research that aims to adopt a more subject- centred approach to a topic. Semi-structured interviews were adopted as the main approach for the empirical study with a series of questions and prompts prepared in advance of the interview though often not used in the same order or with the same wording across different interviews (see Appendix 4). The aim was to reconcile two potentially contradictory drivers in the interview, the researcher’s motivation to discuss a particular topic and their desire to enable the participant to subjectively navigate the themes most relevant to them. In this sense, the interview is understood more as an interactive dialogue (Fontana & Frey, 2000; De Fina, 2011).

This type of interviewing can be usefully compared to what Fontana & Frey (2000) describe as the traditional and ‘rational’ type of interviewing that assumes that the interview is an opportunity to access external, objective knowledge by a skilled interviewer who remains neutral, passive and detached from the situation and the interviewee. However, as argued by Alvesson (2011), the interview still needs to be understood as a deeply socially-embedded interaction; the adoption of the interview with a realist epistemology, for example, may unwittingly lead to assumptions about the ‘truthfulness’ of the material gathered. Realism’s epistemological relativism, the belief in a socially-produced reality, would need to be evident in the analysis of the data gathered, even if this data was argued to provide insight into the layers of a knowable reality.

- 99 -

“Interview accounts may just as well be seen as the outcomes of political considerations, script-following, impression management, the operation of discourses constituting subjects and governing their responses” Alvesson (2011: 4)

The adoption of interview data as a principal source of research material would therefore need to demonstrate sensitivity to the more contested and contextually embedded nature of the qualitative data this generated; as argued by Alevsson (2011), researchers using interview data need to demonstrate greater ‘reflexivity’ in interpreting the dialogues with their participants’.

The thesis argues that the adoption of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as an approach to data analysis offers such a possibility. IPA is an approach that focuses in detail on individual lived experiences, aiming to understand the meaning-making activities of individuals within specific socio/ cultural contexts (Smith & Osborn 2007; Shinebourne, 2011), as argued in the following quote:

“meaning is central, and the aim is to try to understand the content and complexity of those meanings rather than measure their frequency”

(Smith & Osborn, 2007:66).

Shinebourne (2011) argues that IPA can be considered a “synthesis of ideas” in relation to qualitative research (Shinebourne, 2011:45) in that it is combines a phenomenological focus on the subject and their meaning-making activities with a hermeneutic sensitivity to the influence of interpretation activities of researcher and subject, bounded by socially constructed language and discourse. Though arguably social constructionist at heart, it is fundamentally experiential, characterised by an idiographic position that emphasises more the individual experience and how the world appears to the individual (Eatough & Smith, 2006). This “light constructionist stance” (Eatough & Smith, 2006: 484) was also considered to be the most appropriate for the study’s psychological construction view of emotion.

The analysis of interview data according to IPA would therefore emphasise the multiple interpretative acts at the heart of any description of ‘reality’; it would place emphasis on those undertaken by the interviewee in their own process of meaning-making activity and those of the interviewer, with their own background, interests and agendas. The

- 100 -

iterative nature of these interpretative acts could also be a usual extension of the view of the interview as a dialogue (e.g. De Fina, 2011). It could be argued that the adoption of the interview with a realist epistemology emphasises this aspect. The realist and IPA- led analysis would therefore seek to understand both how the individual makes sense of their world, whilst reflecting on how this understanding is shaped by the structural constraints on their experience and attempting to also be mindful of how these same circumstances affect the interviewer’s own interpretation and analysis efforts.

It is therefore acknowledged that Alvesson’s (2011) notes of caution regarding the interpretation of material from interviews are especially relevant to research adopting a realist epistemology. However, in the case of the current empirical study, attempts will be made to adopt the reflexivity Alvesson suggests by adhering to an IPA approach.

3.6.2.2 Data Gathering & Analysis

After having completed the questionnaire, all staff were invited to attend an interview with the researcher. A total of 12 interviews were carried out; 8 of these were with Subject Group Leavers (managers), the remaining 4 with academic members of staff. All volunteers for the interview were given information about the study in advance and were asked to sign an Informed Consent form. The interviews lasted from 35mins to just over an hour; all interviewer were transcribed by the researcher into Word. Comments from the questionnaires were copied into excel for analysis.

The main aim of the analysis of qualitative data (interviews and participant comments) was to gain a subjective understanding of the phenomenon, i.e. of emotion display at work, from the participants’ point of view; this is in line with the thesis’s adoption of a psychological construction perspective on emotion and its interest in the psychological ‘ingredients’ of subjective experience (e.g. Gross & Barrett.2011).

- 101 -

A step-by-step approach to the IPA-informed analysis was adopted, as outlined by Smith & Osborn (2007) and Shinebourne (2011). All data was anonymised and pseudonyms adopted for each interviewee. After an initial stage of engagement with the transcripts and familiarisations with the content, the data was entered into NVivo software to enable the identification of meaningful themes. This analysis was undertaken using a broad thematic analysis whose flexibility as an approach has been argued by Braun & Clarke (2006) to make it suitable for adoption with a number of research philosophy positions. An example of the output of this initial thematic analysis conducted in NVivo is available in Appendix 5. This initial analysis did generate some insight, however, in the researcher’s experience, it lacked the ability to gain a more subject-centred view of emotion display. In line with the focus of IPA research generally, this stage needed to allow the development of an understanding of each single participant’s subjective experience of emotion display first, before attempting any integration across participants to generate common themes (Smith & Osborn, 2007). Both the thematic analysis approach adopted and the configuration of NVivo was leading the analysis to focus from the start on possible common themes; its emphasis on building models based on common themes and NVivo’s inherent quantification of the data gathered (e.g. the emphasis on % of text across interviews allocated to a particular theme) was leading away from an individual-focused subjective understanding to a group-based understanding.

A decision was therefore made to start the analysis again from scratch, relying instead on manual analysis and note-taking, rather than a data analysis package. The data analysis was conducted in three phases, with clear end points, that were then revisited iteratively, following Smith &Osborn (2007) and Shinebourne (2011). The first phase involved re-reading all the transcripts and taking notes in the margins to highlight important themes, questions and issues (see Appendix 6 for an example). Then, a single A4 table was constructed for each participant that outlined the main themes to emerge from their account of the phenomenon of emotion display at work; this table synthesised the elements that were perceived to be most important for that individual participant and included links to specific quotes (see Appendix 7 for an example). Only at this stage did the analysis attempt a gradual integration of themes and elements across participants,

- 102 -

with an emphasis on the meaningfulness of the themes for the individual participants, rather than on the frequency with which they were mentioned. At this stage, a clearer interpretative influence was also exercised, with each main theme linked to the relevant literature (see Appendix 8 for an example). The write-up of the themes, both in the data analysis and then in the thesis itself, was done with explicit attention to the interpretative activities not only of the participant but also of the researcher (Shinebourne, 2011).

It is argued that IPA’s emphasis on phenomenology, hermeneutic interpretation and idiographic focus is particularly appropriate for the thesis’s aim and its adoption of the psychological construction view of emotion at work. The re-analysis of the data according to distinct phases emphasised this in many ways. It generated meaningful themes as a result of an in-depth understanding of individual, subjective experience; with each of these representing clear, distinct phases of the data analysis process. It also enabled a focus on the interpretation of participants of their lived experiences of emotion at work, whilst also attempting to give emphasis to the researcher’s own interpretation of both these meaning-making activities, as influence by context, understood in part as relevant discourses. As argued by Eatough & Smith (2006), IPA can offer additional insight to the experience of emotion, compared to other forms of qualitative research, and it has been argued, is particularly suited to the development of an integrated understanding of emotion display at work.