Sampling Design and Unit of Analysis

The target participants were doctors practicing in Hamilton and Wellington (two mid-size cities in New Zealand). Contact details were obtained from the New Zealand Medical Council database. Doctors, who are the key members in healthcare organisations, are more suitable for this study than other healthcare workers because their jobs are particularly knowledge-intensive, and they are the principal professional group in hospitals (Habersam & Piber, 2003; Ryu et al., 2003). Furthermore, the contact details of doctors were accessible while other employees’ contact details such as those of nurses and administrators were not available.

Based on Sekaran and Bougie (2010), a good sampling frame is a list of population members that is regularly updated, where the information is readily accessible and convenient to access. The New Zealand Medical Council database (accessible online) fulfilled these criteria. The information available from the database that was useful for this survey were the names of doctors, their addresses, and whether they have an annual practice certificate that enables them to practice. The New Zealand Medical Council database is updated every six months and therefore, the information available in the database was up-to-date.

To participate in the survey, the participants needed to have some experience in using KMS. To confirm whether the participants had experience in using KMS, a preliminary survey was conducted with Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of District Health Boards (DHBs) (see Appendix A). Based on the input from the CIOs, their organisations used information technologies such as electronic mail, document management systems, video conferencing, and electronic discussion forums to share knowledge. It was expected that doctors would use these technologies to share and to access knowledge.

From the list, the potential participants were chosen based on the following criteria:

x Only doctors who have an annual practice certificate and reside in New Zealand were included in the sample (the New Zealand Medical Council database includes contact details of doctors who are registered but no longer live in New Zealand).

x Due to the time constraints and limited budget of the researcher, the survey did not cover the whole population of doctors in New Zealand. The study focused on doctors in Hamilton and Wellington, two mid-size cities in New Zealand, with population of doctors (according to the database) of 525 and 639, respectively. In choosing the number of potential respondents to include in the sample, a number of conditions were set. First, this was based on the minimum response rate of 20 percent acceptable for a survey (Yu & Cooper, 1983). Second, the sample size was based on the heuristics proposed by Chin (1998b). Chin suggested that for PLS analysis, which was used in this study, the overall number of responses should be 10 times the maximal number of independent variables for a dependent variable in the model. Based on this calculation, the minimum number of responses required for this study was 50 (and thus, assuming 20 percent response rate, the sample size should be 250). Third, the number of potential

respondents was chosen based on the previous studies of KMS success using models of similar size. In the study by Ryu et al. (2003), the sample size was 1000. Based on these criteria, the target sample size for this study was 1000 (which was considerably larger than the sample size of 250 implied by the Chin’s heuristics). Thus, the total population of doctors at Hamilton and Wellington fulfilled this requirement and was sufficient for conducting the survey.

4.6 Ethics

To conduct this study, a number of ethical issues were considered. The information collected from the participants was kept confidential and only aggregated results were reported. The participation was voluntary. Data collected for this study was used solely for this research. These ethical issues were elaborated on in the information sheet given to the participants. To ensure that the standards of ethics are maintained, ethics approval was sought from the relevant committee.

The process of seeking ethics approval began by contacting Massey University Human Ethic Committee. Then, the steps summarized below were followed:

1. The researcher filled in a screening questionnaire. The answers suggested that this research required the ethics approval from New Zealand Health and Disability Ethics Committee.

2. The next step was to contact New Zealand Health and Disability Ethics Committee for advice on the types of application that were relevant to this research by providing information about this research including the objectives, the participants, and the methods used.

3. Based on the advice from New Zealand Health and Disability Ethics Committee, the researcher submitted an application under the category of expedited review, which takes two to three weeks to be processed. Together with the application, the researcher submitted an information sheet explaining the proposed research and the ethical procedures to be followed, the questionnaire to be used as a research instrument, cover letter, and a description of the study protocol. Two copies of the application were sent to New Zealand

Health and Disability Ethics Committee, and one copy was sent to Massey University Human Ethics Committee as a notification.

4. The process of obtaining approval took two weeks, and the researcher was informed via email that the research was approved.

5. The researcher received an official approval notification by New Zealand Health and Disability Ethics Committee, which included the approval reference number. This number was then included in the information sheet that was sent to the participants of the research.