According to Abdulai (2007), there are different approaches for collecting quantitative data in research. These are through questionnaires, observation, documentary evidence and conducting desktop research. However, questionnaires are more widely used in conducting surveys to determine the opinions, views, beliefs and facts about the participants in a research study (Denscombe, 2007). This study also adopted the questionnaire instrument as the data collection tool that would be used to obtain information from professionals on health and safety issues in the Saudi oil and gas construction projects. Kumar (2014) confirmed that questionnaires are outstanding tools in survey research. This is mostly because they are flexible, quick to administer and relatively inexpensive to administer to a large sampled population (Denscombe, 2007).
There are several ways in which questionnaires are administered to potential respondents. These include face-to-face or self-administered questions, telephone, postal, web-based surveys, fax surveys and even interviews. The selection of which one to adopt is mostly linked to the nature of the research, the convenience for the researcher and the cost implication. In short, they all have advantages and disadvantages. Telephone or face-to-face interviews are rather expensive and may be time consuming. In the case of postal
106 questionnaires, these are reliable in covering a large geographical area with few financial and human resources (Bryman, 2008), however they usually require a follow-up. In addition, postal surveys could be affected by problems such as lack of control over respondents, inaccurate responses as a result of misinterpretation, and an inability to clarify when needed. The use of fax surveys are also effective and can also be administered with less effort. However, their major disadvantage are that the respondent and the researcher must both have a fax machine to use this means. Furthermore, the fact that the respondents must print the questionnaires at their expense may affect their willingness to take part in the survey. Web-based surveys are relatively fast, cheap and usually cover large geographical areas. But this form of questionnaire administration requires the respondents' email addresses and internet facilities. The face-to-face or self-administered survey may be time consuming and require lots of effort from the researcher. However, this approach is practical and usually more reliable than other collection methods because of the direct contact with the respondents. The advantage of this approach is that clarification could be sorted and given to the respondents, direct contact could induce a great number of respondents, the respondents are allowed to complete the questionnaire in their own privacy and comfort, it is practically inexpensive compared to most data collection methods, and a large number of responses could be collected within a short period. Therefore, the self-administered or face-to-face questionnaire survey was adopted.
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Ethical Considerations
The presence of ethical policies and practices during the collection of the data items and their analysis gives considerably good result for the research study. The consideration of ethical policies gives a broader base to the research study, which further reduces the possibility of any loopholes in the research study. There are some ethical issues, which a researcher has to bear in mind at the time of conducting the research. The researcher needs to take care of the ethical requirements of the research work. An ethical approval will also be obtained from the University of Wolverhampton ethics committee before conducting the research. The ethical considerations are necessary to protect the participants, gain their confidence and trust, promote the research integrity and guard against inappropriateness (Kimmel, 2009).
In the process of securing the data, the computers that will be used through the research process will be kept under the custody of the researcher. The computers used in the process are kept under password protection and will not have permission to be used by some other person during the research process. The contents that are included in the literature review section will not be copied and pasted from various internet sources. Every line in the thesis will be written in the required language and format by the researcher. A plagiarism report will be submitted with the research work that will ensure that all the resources have been used only for reference and nothing has been copied from any other source (Axinn and Pearce, 2006).
Under other ethical consideration, the anonymous status of respondents will be maintained throughout the research process. The responses given by the respondents will not be shared with any government or non-government organisation. Potential respondents will be given a
108 required amount of information about the research processes and different data collection methods. The above mentioned are some ethical guidelines that were considered in advance to make the research work more viable and authentic.
Population and Sampling
A research population can be defined as a large collection of people or objects that have peculiar characteristics that are of interest to the researcher (Bless et al., 2006; Kumar, 2014). Sampling involves the practical approach of choosing a few samples from a larger population to serve as the basis for the estimation, generalisation and prediction of an unknown piece of information, situation and result regarding a larger group. Consequently, sampling saves time, costs and human resources. According to Kumar (2014), there are three major classifications of sampling techniques. These are random probability, non-random probability and mixed sampling techniques (See Figure 4.2).
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Figure 4.2: Types of Sampling Technique (Source: Ogunbiyi, 2014)