R ESEARCH DESIGN

Rodwell and Woody (1994) assert that for constructivist inquiry:

… the mutual interaction of the inquirer and the respondents as well as the value base of the inquiry influence the preferred methodological strategies

and that such strategies include

… data collection in a natural setting and reliance on an emerging research design, with the human inquirer as the primary research instrument. Qualitative methods, particularly interviewing and participant observation, are chosen to allow a probing of the tacit, or intuitive knowledge of the respondent. Results are reported in a case study format with a focus on words rather than numerical data to provide a thick description of the phenomena under study. (p. 316)

A short course was scheduled to take place locally at the beginning of the research period, in October 1995. A research design that could be framed around the experiences of attending practitioners appeared both possible and potentially fruitful but was not without its drawbacks.

The advantages of constructing the fieldwork around the practitioners attending this event were: ▪maximising the use of my own participant-observer position, as attendance at the training event

was possible;

▪minimising the risk that researcher and practitioners while talking about the same SFT approach might be talking about different forms151 (although it is acknowledged that the SFT approach itself is still evolving);

▪ensuring that access to ‘the field’ would be less problematic, as the course organiser and some of the course participants would be ex-colleagues of mine. My own credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of the participants were strengthened by my recent working life as a colleague and practitioner. I could be seen to ‘know’ their world.

The prospective use of a particular cohort of practitioners all receiving training at the same time was also seen to offer some advantages:

▪by providing a large number of practitioners with varied lengths of experience, work settings, and orientations to practice who would all be exposed to the same training event;

▪strengthening the co-operation of participants by notifying them of the research project at the time of the course

▪improving the reliability of the source of data by prospective agreement with the course organisers that a detailed and accurate attendance list would be compiled.

Relying on the training course and its participants as the primary source of data also yielded some drawbacks:

▪the extent to which I had been connected with the introduction of SFT through my organisation of earlier SFT training posed the risk that participants might be less likely to report negatively on their experiences or views and that the study would suffer from ‘response bias’ (Yin, 1994: 80);

▪as a former working colleague of some of the participants and as a former user of the approach, it would be a challenge to create a suitable distance from the material to enable some conceptualisations and objective assessment to take place.

Both drawbacks were addressed explicitly in the research design: the first by the decision to interview the participants by telephone and by explicitly giving permission to the interviewees to ‘rubbish’ the approach; the second by adopting a research design which allowed data analysis to be completed after fieldwork had taken place, thus increasing the time distance since my transition from practitioner to academic.

THE RESPECTIVE ROLES OF PRACTITIONER AND RESEARCHER

Lang (1994), in considering both the similarities and the differences between the practitioner and the researcher, concludes that the social work profession ‘appears to have an imbalance between strategies that produce knowledge and those that direct action’ (p. 273). She suggests that combined researcher-practitioner initiatives focused on direct practice allow ‘both knowing and doing to be derived from the same data (p. 274, my emphasis). Existing theory has a more provisional status, and ‘must be examined in terms of its relevance, scope, potency, adequacy and completeness’ (p. 276) so that theory can be generated inductively as well as applied deductively. Alliances between practitioners and academics can occur: ‘so that the practitioner carries the bottom level of observing, recording and first-level abstracting, while the academician works in the upper levels of abstraction, generalization, classification and conceptualization’ (p. 271).

Fook (2000) suggests that in theorising social work practice, research studies based on collaborative and participatory forms of inquiry ‘recognise that theories are often most effectively

generated from practice through an alliance and dialogue between researchers and practitioners’ (Fook, 2000: 4). Stern (1994) highlights the responsibility placed on researchers who:

… must find ways to capture their (practitioners) wealth of knowledge accumulated from experience. For example, in-depth interviews with practitioners can involve them in knowledge-building activities without burdening them with the requirements of research methods. (p. 288)

My familiarity with the practice theory, and my closeness to and recent membership of the world which I was now investigating threw up both advantages and disadvantages as already outlined. The need to minimise the effects of my public association with the method led to a rather unusual method of data collection: that of in-depth telephone interviewing.

TELEPHONE INTERVIEWING

While case studies are sometimes presumed to require long periods of immersion in the ‘field’, Yin (1994) has also noted that ‘One could even do a valid and high-quality case study without leaving the library and the telephone, depending upon the topic being studied’ (p. 11).

This study was unusual in that respect: the main body of fieldwork was conducted in the form of in-depth telephone interviewing, supplemented by documentary analysis.

The contemporary researcher should consider how the different modes (of interviewing) might be used in combination with the purpose of capitalising on the respective strengths of each mode and limiting the effects of their respective weaknesses. (Lavrakas, 1993: viii.)

Telephone interviewing has been a popular and widespread method of data collection in social research, particularly since the Second World War (Sarantakos, 1993: 196). Although commonplace in surveys and quantitative studies, it is less frequently used in qualitative research. Although cheaper than face to face interviewing surveys, it also has limitations:

… visual aids cannot be used to help put over question and anSocial Workerer categories; the interviewer is deprived of all the visual cues that give information on the respondent’s reaction and also of the opportunity to communicate verbally by smiling, eye contact etc. Non-response is usually 5-10 % higher on telephone than on comparable face to face interviews. (Sarantakos, p. 156)

Sarantakos has listed the advantages and disadvantages of telephone interviewing, which when the use of randomised dialling and selection techniques are excluded (as not relevant to this design) include:

Advantages: produces quick results; allows the study of relatively large samples; is relatively economical; allows more open communication since the respondent is not confronted by the interviewer; reduces bias in that factors such as race, ethnicity, appearance and age do not influence the respondents; and offers more anonymity than other techniques.

Limitations: the risk of a high refusal; the exclusion of visual observation and contact; the difficulty of controlling totally interview conditions.

For this study, the advantages of telephone interviewing were seen to outweigh the limitations because of the psychological distance it offered which offset particular local factors in play: the public association of the researcher with the approach under examination; and the previous relationship of the researcher to some of the participants as colleagues.

Foddy (1993) discussing the effects that are likely when the interviewer is perceived by the respondent as a social equal, suggests that:

… psychological distance between the interviewer and the respondent can be increased by removing the physical presence of the interviewer from the interviewer from the research situation. This can be done by conducting interviews over the telephone. (p. 121)

The trade-off for the creation of this distance was the disadvantage of not having the benefit of the non-verbal cues which a face-to-face researcher can use, and not being in a position to fully control the conditions of the interview. This was a factor of some concern because of my knowledge of the busy and often crowded conditions in local social work offices. As the nature of the questions was qualitative and evaluative, this could have created a restraint on the respondent. It was therefore suggested both in the initial contact letter, and at the beginning of the telephone contact, that the interview could be conducted

at the respondent’s home telephone number if so wished.

Several of the respondents exercised this option, but the majority chose to be interviewed

at their place of work, often arranging a time when there would be privacy or less than

usual activity in the workplace.

In this study, telephone interviewing was felt to lessen the risk that participants would report what they thought the researcher wanted to hear and it was thought more likely that participants would report negative impressions over the telephone than in a face-to-face interview. A telephone survey was also logistically simpler. Potential respondents were based in a total of 37 locations, including three outside Dublin. Face-to-face interviews would have consumed considerable time and expense.

The practice of making initial contact with a letter has been said to increase response rates and was used. Although a non-response rate of 10-15% has been reported for telephone surveys (Morton- Williams, 1993: 156), these refer to anonymous randomised surveys. No outright refusal to participate was expressed in my study. Respondents with whom direct telephone contact was not established, despite message-leaving and repeated attempts at contact, were treated as ‘refusals’. Their number totalled 8 of the eligible 60 respondents, or 7.5%, a good deal lower than the figure quoted above.

The length of time for which it is possible to engage respondents in a telephone interview has also been a subject of debate. Although telephone interviewing was initially regarded as appropriate only for very short questionnaires, it has been found that 20-30 minute interviews are acceptable both for business and general population surveys. Findings both in the United States and in Britain, based on large-scale studies, indicate that differences between answers given in telephone and face- to-face interviews are small (Groves & Kahn, 1979; Sykes & Collins, 1987). Respondents tend to give briefer answrers to open questions on the telephone and there are said to be ‘some mode effects on answers to sensitive questions’ (Morton-Williams, 1993: 157), which primarily indicate that people are less likely to give socially acceptable answers to questions concerned with social prejudice, but are reluctant to share more personal information such as personal finances. As there is no literature relating to smaller-scale, local surveys where the interviewer and respondent belong to the same local professional groupings and are known to each other, the implications of these findings for this study can only be speculative.

Royse (1995) suggests that the question of relevance of the topic to the interviewee is probably a significant factor in telephone interviewing:

As a general rule, the more interesting the topic is for the respondent, the greater the probability that the respondent will complete the interview even if it is lengthy. (p. 152)

In this study, interviews varied tremendously in length from about 15 minutes in the handful of cases where practitioners had not engaged with either the approach or the training and had little to say about either, to over 60 minutes for those who were more engaged in discussing and reflecting on their practice. The majority of the interviews lasted for between 30-45 minutes. In line with Morton-Williams’ (1993) findings that ‘much refusal to participate arises because the time at which the approach is made is inconvenient’ (p. 166), many of the initial contacts did not result in an interview at that point but a scheduled one at a later date. In retrospect, I feel it would have improved the quality of the study if a ‘fall back’ set of questions had been devised to anticipate the non-engagement of some of the respondents with the specific SFT content. This would have enabled me to track in greater detail the theorising processes of those workers who had not engaged with SFT.

The interviews were timed to take place at least a year after the training event. This decision was based on my existing knowledge on salience of events and memory recall, my interest in the longer-term as opposed to immediate effects of innovation introduction and in the impact of environmental factors in the transfer process.