Research Methods and Data Analysis

Once the target LPA cases and SPs had been identified, contacted and participation had been agreed, the next task was conducting the fieldwork and collecting the empirical data. This section outlines how the fieldwork was undertaken, and the rationales behind the decisions made during the process, before moving on to explain how the empirical data was coded and analysed to present the research findings.

3.4.1 Fieldwork and Data Collection

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The first research design decision was that qualitative data would be most suitable for answering the research questions. The decision was made that the most appropriate tool for uncovering and probing participant experiences and responses was semi-structured interviews conducted in person. As a result, all 40 of the research interviews were conducted face-to-face with the participant and within their respective local authority building where they are employed. Logistically, this meant that the researcher would have to plan train travel and accommodation across England to conduct the interviews. The upshot was that the researcher could explore the local area and get a ‘feel’ for the socio-spatial context before each interview, which added to the understanding of planning issues in place. This observational element neatly complemented the desk-based review of local planning policy documents, projects and related material that provided the groundwork contextual information before the formal interviews (in the form of a well-worn fieldwork notebook which has not been possible to include in the appendix).

The main research method was based on semi-structured interviews delivered using an ‘interview guide’

outlining the initial core themes/topics and using ‘open-ended’ questions to explore them. Semi-structured interviews were chosen to ensure that each interview amounted to more than a rigid question set with no room for deviation, nor merely an informal conversation that had no guiding structure or themes. The flexibility of this research tool allowed the participant scope to outline their own understandings around what has been important to practice, whilst also providing an overall coherence and structure to data collection. More importantly for the actual interview process, the approach was to treat the interviews as a more relaxed and friendly conversational approach rather than a formal process, especially when talking about potentially controversial subjects such as austerity and housing growth. This approach was taken to build rapport and show respect to the interviewees and their professional lives rather than feeling like they were being used instrumentally to collect data.

There are also some important methodological and practical limits of using semi-structured interviews with senior planners to understand changes in local authority practices. Firstly, research interviews can be problematic because the informant may have incomplete knowledge or memory. Moreover the interviewee ‘will always have subjective perceptions that will be related to their own past experiences and current conditions. At best, interviewees will only give what they are prepared to reveal about their subjective perceptions of events and opinions. These perceptions and opinions will change over time, and according to circumstance. They may be at some considerable distance from ‘reality’ as others might see it’ (Walford cited in Roulston, 2010, p. 203). In this respect the informant is not an objective

“vessel of information” (Cloke et al, 2006) that will provide the ‘truth’ for any given event or subject.

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Secondly, as Kitchin and Tate (2000) explain, the informant might try to predict what the researcher wants to hear rather than articulating their own views. They might therefore provide a response that does not truly reflect their understanding or position on an issue which means we ‘cannot always rely on interviewees giving truthful and rational statements concerning their intentions or meanings’ (p. 234).

Furthermore, the interviewee might respond to the questions in any number of problematic ways;

including ‘misinformation’, ‘evasions’, ‘lies’ and ‘fronts’ (Roulston, 2010, Roulston, 2011, Roulston, 2014). Especially questions related to the informant’s personal life, work or politics, which means they may get defensive or simply repeat the ‘party line’ providing an uncritical ‘official’ account. This is pertinent here because austerity and community engagement under localism can be sensitive political issues for practitioners. Thirdly there are related issues around power dynamics when interviewing elite actors that need to be considered (Cochrane, 1998, Odendahl and Shaw, 2002, Mikecz, 2012). Taken together these challenges mean that the interview data must be treated with some degree of caution.

Furthermore, interview methods have been criticised for a number of more practical issues; including that the data they produce is too subjective with the researcher too heavily involved in creating the data; that the research is difficult to replicate and there is a lack of transparency; that the researcher needs to be clear about the contexts in which the research takes place and question the generalisation of the findings; that there is only a limited time for interviewees to get views across to the researcher;

the criticism that interview data is ‘soft’ evidence and extent to which words always convey meaning;

and perhaps most crucially the challenges around gaining ‘access’ to the right cases and participants.

Despite these methodological and practical challenges of research interviews, they also have a number of strengths, including; eliciting the views, perceptions and opinions of respondents; understanding actor motivations, expectations and justifications for their actions and how they made certain decisions;

describing the circumstances and contexts people operate within and extracting their professional and personal stories; the ability to build rapport and deal with sensitive issues and topics; being flexible and responsive to emerging ideas; explaining processes, complexity and diversity of experiences, viewpoints, emotions, social relations, behaviours, etc.; and presenting in-depth explanations of the ‘social world’

from the perspective of people studied. The strength of interviews here is they provided practice-based appraisals to assess the claims and effectiveness of government policy as it was implemented.

The next main decision concerned how to conduct the interview process. The research design was deliberately set up to be inductive, open-ended and co-constructed; so that general questions could provide space for a range of practitioner-led responses on the research themes, before posing more

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specific probing questions (based on the academic literature and/or responses to questioning). As such, an ‘interview guide’ was the main tool used to keep the conversation flowing and relevant (Appendix C). An interview guide has three core elements (Silva et al., 2014); 1) an Informed Consent Statement (discussed below); 2) Grand-tour and Probe questions; and 3) a Closing Statement. The initial ‘grand-tour’ questions ask the respondent to provide an overview of a major theme being investigated, with

‘probes’ being used as specific follow-up questions to flesh out details and issues within the major themes/concepts. The interviews started with general ‘icebreaker’ questions to ease the participants into the discussion before moving on to more detailed, complex, or controversial questions and issues;

with the sequence adjusted if necessary to suit local context and the flow of the interview. The closing statement asked if there were any further issues they would like to discuss or elaborate on, which might have been missed or they feel are important for understanding the phenomenon, and then provided a final ‘debriefing’ where the participant was thanked for their time and any final details were exchanged.

The research project was designed in accordance with the University of Reading’s Code of Ethics and was approved by the Real Estate and Planning departmental ethics board before any fieldwork was conducted. An integrated research information and informed consent sheet was verbally administered (or read by the interviewee) and then signed for each participant at the start of every interview undertaken in the project (Appendix B). This informed the participant of the purpose of the research and assured them of data protection compliance and confidentiality in the research output. This meant that the decision was made to anonymise the LA cases and SP/PM actors when quoting their interpretations as part of these ethical considerations. It was acknowledged that austerity and pro-growth reforms are often treated as sensitive political subjects within localities, and some actors would not necessarily want their personal understandings to be attributed back to them publicly. The rationale was that confidentiality would allow these actors to speak more openly and freely about these issues, and without the reader losing too much from a more general characterisation of their context.

In practice, research ethics means not pressuring or harming the participant in any way; such as interrogating or exploiting them for information; sharing sensitive or embarrassing information about them; forcing them to discuss traumatic events; leading them to compare themselves to idealised standards/normative theories that they fail to meet; etc. As well as showing respect and honouring promises to participants; such as not deceiving or pretending to share beliefs or falsely claiming experience to gain confidence; not misrepresenting the topic or purpose of the study to allay suspicion and gain access; not promising confidentiality or benefits if you might not be able to keep them; not wasting their time by showing up late or asking for background information that is available from other

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sources; allowing participants to finish their points rather than cutting them off or starting a new question as soon as the discussion begins to deviate; and offering to provide the results; etc. These were all important ethical considerations when conducting the research interviews for this project.

Next the decision was made to record the interviews using an electronic recording device and to keep note taking to a minimum during the process. This was both to fully concentrate on interacting with the participants and engage with their views and develop a conversational rather than formal atmosphere.

All of the participants agreed to be recorded following the explanation of the informed consent sheet.

At this stage, a number of core decisions concerning the nature, scope and style of which questions to ask the participants were made through the creation and subsequent revisions of the interview guide.

In essence, the questions on national planning reforms post-2010 sought to uncover practice-based evaluations of the NPPF, policy deregulations and the localism agenda. These initially took the form of asking PMs grand-tour questions on how the NPPF or localism has impacted local planning practices in their locality, followed by more specific ‘probing’ questions on core policy changes (e.g. on duty to cooperate or neighbourhood planning) or other issues raised in relation to their practices. Similarly, the questions on austerity started generally and then progressed to specific issues (e.g. resilience/capacity issues, shared services and alternative service delivery models, revenue generating strategies to cover the costs of planning, etc.). In both cases, the interview guide questions were based on the national policy/rhetoric and academic literature/theory outlined in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively.

The interview guide served as a prompt to navigate the researcher during the process, although it was not shown to the participant to ensure it did not influence or (re)direct their responses. It was divided into the two main headings on ‘Planning Reform’ and ‘Planning Resources and Budget’ condensed onto one-side of A4 paper for ease of use with each containing bullet-points on the key themes/concepts (Appendix C). One main concern was not to presuming a priori how LPA cases and SP/PMs from across a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts had understood, experienced and responded to reforms. Rather than being prescriptive, the questions were designed to be open-ended so that the participants could initially decide what was most important about the key themes. Therefore, the early questions for each theme were very broad (e.g. “Can you tell me about your experiences of austerity and what it has meant for planning practices here?”) so that the researcher was then not directing (pigeon-holing) the possible responses of the participant in the first instances of questioning. In this respect, the interview guide was deliberately flexible and incrementally adapted during the fieldwork process to reflect issues raised by practitioners consistent with the inductive and grounded approach.

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The combination of a ‘thematised’ interview guide and detailed place-specific notes developed in a field notebook allowed for a deeper conversation around general issues that could draw on local examples.

This approach was effective for demonstrating to the participant that the researcher had ‘done their homework’ concerning the particular local planning policy and development context within their LG, which more importantly meant that precious time could be focussed on the main issues over context.

The fieldwork generated 40 audio recordings. Whilst a few of the interviews were shorter than an hour because of time pressures on the day, a similar number exceeded the requested 1-hour time slot; with the shortest interview being 30 minutes and the longest lasting two and a half hours. As the amount of primary data collected increased, the decision was made to use a professional transcription agency to assist with transcription. The researcher transcribed 15 audio files and the remaining 25 were done by the company Transcription Agency; however, the transcriptions not undertaken by the researcher personally were rigorously reviewed to ensure that important details had not been missed. In practice, some interviews were transcribed in the days immediately after the interviews whilst others had to wait during busy periods of fieldwork activity. The empirical data now formed 40 text-based documents.

The research design formed a relatively traditional methodological approach to qualitative research; as the objective was to generate primary data on the experiences and responses of PMs across the cases, based on examples of local practices, strategies and challenges within and between specific LPAs, as a means to develop an overall picture of planning practices under austerity and policy reforms 2010-2016.

3.4.2 Data Coding and Analysis

Now that the primary empirical data had been collected the formal stages of the analysis could begin.

The first phase of coding comprised ‘open-coding’, which was necessary to sift and sort through the mass of empirical transcript data into ‘organising’ or ‘container’ meta-themes. This was conducted using the qualitative coding software NVivo in order to manage the large amount of textual data. In their original state, the interview transcripts presented the unorganised multiple themes within each case that made abstraction and comparison challenging. As such, the first phase of open-coding sorted the data from the 40 ‘case’ transcripts into 7 ‘thematic’ transcripts. In essence this meant that instead of scanning through each of the 40 case transcripts individually for all references to ‘localism’, a decontextualized thematic transcript collated all of the empirical data on localism into one document.

These thematic transcripts then provided the material for the second phase analytical ‘focussed-coding’.

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This first phase open-coding was essentially a data management exercise. It allowed the researcher to make sense of ‘chunks’ of textual data within the interview transcripts by assigning them to a simplified category that succinctly sums up the content of the extract (e.g. ‘housing’). It encompassed all the data collected to ensure that nothing was excluded during the early stages of analysis and to avoid attaching meaning a priori. Initially the ‘organising’ meta-codes needed to be sufficiently broad and flexible enough to represent the largest unit concepts for breaking down and categorising the data. Seven organising meta-codes (nodes) were created for this purpose; 1) Austerity and Local Government Financial Settlement; 2) Change in English Local Government Planning; 3) Growth, Infrastructure and Strategic Planning; 4) Housing; 5) Localism; 6) National Policy Reform; 7) Local Plan-Making, Strategy and Uncertainty. These organising themes were broad enough to categorise the interview data effectively by theme but required a further level of analytical focussed-coding. These seven organising meta-codes were divided into roughly three to four ‘sub-codes’ each that focus more clearly on a specific area for analysis (except for ‘Local Plan-Making’ which did not require further subdivision). In total, twenty-two sub-codes were created covering the seven main organising codes (Appendix D).

In contrast, the second phase focussed-coding was more selective and theoretically-informed, based on the research questions and theoretical framework and the emergent practice-based concepts (e.g.

‘commercialisation’). This higher level of coding was completed by hand through highlighting and annotating the (more manageable) thematic transcripts. This activity was repeated a number of times.

The first read through was ‘exploratory’ to find the interlinkages and outliers within the organising themes and sub-codes. Then subsequent ‘readings’ sought to further develop the key and emerging themes within and across the empirical data set. Decisions had to be made here about where to focus attention. The researcher had to make a number of judgments at these points to decide which information had the most analytical value and what needed to be presented to the reader. However, this was a highly subjective task, influenced by the researcher’s positionality/world view. In deciding on how to present the key findings, a significant amount of collected data has been omitted. In practice, these higher second level coding stages were not linear but a messy back and forth between exploring the data and trying to critically interpret meaning within the frames of the research (Chapters 1 and 2).

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Figure 14 – Approach to Qualitative Analysis using Interview Data:

Source: https://www.transcriptioncentre.co.uk/blog/2014/6/10/analysing-your-interviews.

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The approach taken here broadly followed Rubin and Rubin’s (2012) structure of the ‘general stages’

involved in qualitative analysis based on interview data (with stages 6-7 dependent on the project):

1) Transcribe and summarise each interview.

2) Define, find, and mark in the text (code) excerpts that have relevant concepts, themes, events, examples, names, places or dates.

3) Find the excerpts marked with the same code(s) from across your interview transcripts and sort them into a single data file – then summarise the contents for each collated coding data file.

4) Sort and resort the material within each coded data file, comparing the excerpts between different sub-groups (sub-codes) – then summarise the results of each (re)sorting.

5) Weigh up different versions of coded data and then integrate the descriptions from different interviewees to create a complete picture.

6) Combine concepts and themes to generate theory that can explain the descriptions presented - constantly testing these ideas by examining them in light of the interviews.

7) See how far these results generalize beyond the individuals and cases studied in your project.

Within the interview transcripts, ‘concepts’ are ideas often expressed as a single noun or noun phrase (e.g. affordable housing) or abstract nouns (e.g. empowerment), which often convey goals, values, perceptions, attitudes or represent strategies that frame action for the participants. Similarly the

‘themes’ are summary statements, causal explanations, or conclusions that offer explanations of why something happened, what something means, or how the interviewee feels about a matter. Themes normally show the relationship between two or more concepts, where a statement contains words like

‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘so that is why’, etc. (or you can translate them into that format) this is likely to be a theme connecting concepts (see figure 14 for a visual representation of the approach to analysis).

Now that the core theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to the research have been outlined, the next two chapters present the empirical data and analysis. Chapter 4 examines National Policy Reform and Local Authority Planning Post-2010 and Chapter 5 does the same for Local Authority

Now that the core theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to the research have been outlined, the next two chapters present the empirical data and analysis. Chapter 4 examines National Policy Reform and Local Authority Planning Post-2010 and Chapter 5 does the same for Local Authority