Structured Questionnaire

In addition to interview, I also used structured questionnaires for gathering useful information from the context. The main benefit of the questionnaire survey was that it allowed me to collect the perceptions/views of the respondents about some research related aspects of the university in a standard fashion. The pattern of responses enabled me to identify broader groups of the respondents which share similar views about academics’ research practices and the setting of the university. In this way, the questionnaire data was used to capture an overview of the existing (dis)orderliness among academics at University X, particularly with reference to research and academics’ research practice. The examination of the

(dis)orderliness of people at a particular place was not only an important step in the cultural analysis but was also imperative for explaining the phenomenon of cultural change/stability as suggested by Archer (1996). Therefore, in order to analyse the situation of research culture, the questionnaire data provided necessary and useful information about the research

context which was used to analyse and explain the situation of research culture at University X. Thus my decision to use a structured questionnaire was not only based on the needs of my study but also fulfilled the requirement of Archer’s framework. Moreover, this decision was also supported by the literature on case study research design. For example, Gillham (2000) argues that the use of questionnaire data, specifically quantitative one, along with other data sources was an important way to increase the explanatory power of an investigation as it may enrich the evidence /data about the phenomenon under question.

Besides the benefits of data collection through a structured questionnaire, there were also certain limitations associated with this kind of data which could possibly have

implications for my study; for example, it only enables a researcher to collect opinions/perceptions of the respondents through predefined variables pertaining to a

phenomenon (Cohen et al., 2007). This feature did not allow me to develop an understanding of other than predefined factors. Second, the questionnaire data do not provide deep insight into respondents’ views. This showed its inability to facilitate me for gaining insight into research related views/ideas held by the academics and were imperative for analysing research culture through the morphogenetic perspective. By keeping both benefits and

limitations of questionnaire data, I thus decided to use structured questionnaire for generating data about a certain aspect of the phenomenon i.e. orderliness or/and disorderliness among academics.

Cohen et al. (2007) argue that designing a structured questionnaire may be a time consuming process. I adapted a questionnaire, with the permission already granted (see Appendix E), from a recent study of Santo et al. (2009), which aimed to find out the individual, environmental, and leadership factors influencing the research productivity of academics in a school of education. I had chosen Santo et al.’s (2009) instrument for the following reasons: first, it was developed for the academics of social sciences and the sample of this study also belonged to the same field; second it was devised for the aim, as mentioned above, similar to the purpose of this study. In addition, the speedy analysis of numeric data also saved my time at the data analysis phase.

For collecting data through questionnaire, I conducted a survey on all academics belonging to both faculties (E and F) which were the target population and sample of this study. For this purpose, I distributed the questionnaire and information sheet along with a self-addressed envelope to each participant by meeting with them personally. They were requested to return the filled questionnaire in the envelope to their department’s

administrative office. I collected the completed questionnaires from their respective

departments’ offices after a week. After two weeks, I again visited those academics who had not filled and returned the questionnaire by that time, to remind them to fill in the

Overall, I was able to collect 70 filled questionnaires (see Table 9). Before opening these envelops, I shuffled them. In this way, I was not able to identify the respondents from the completed questionnaires.

4.4.2.1 Piloting of the Study

Before the administration of the final version of the questionnaire, I conducted a small pilot study testing the adapted questionnaire in the context of this study. Initially, in order to contextualize the instrument, I made modifications to the adapted questionnaire based on my knowledge and experience as an academic in University X; for example, I eliminated four items which were included to collect feedback about a particular research group operation in the context for which the instrument was originally designed, and I included a section comprising eight items, which aimed to seek quantitative information of respondents’ research works.

I also took expert opinion of my supervisor. Following the supervisor’s suggestions, I also added two new items (i.e. sub-items ‘e’ and ‘h’ of question no 8.) to the instrument. Moreover, some items were rephrased in the light of supervisor’s comments so that they can be easily understood by the respondents. Finally, the layout of the questionnaire was also changed in order to make it more respondent-friendly. After incorporating these changes, the questionnaire was ready for piloting.

For the piloting of the questionnaire, I identified a group of 10 lecturers who belonged to various Pakistani public universities and were resident in the UK. Similar to the target sample, they also belonged to the field of social sciences, so I contacted this group for conducting the pilot study. The feedback of these respondents was positive in general, but they recommended some minor corrections that were carefully analysed and incorporated in the final version of the questionnaire (see Appendix A).

Piloting, as compared to quantitative research, is a debatable matter in qualitative research owing to the learning experience a researcher may gain during the process of data collection and analysis(Van Teijlingen and Hundley, 2002). A researcher may polish and improve her/his interview guide and questions regularly during the process of data collection as s/he gains research experience and detailed insights into the issue under investigation (Van Teijlingen and Hundley, 2002). Therefore, the interviews conducted at the end of a piece of fieldwork might be more insightful /informative as compared to those conducted earlier. Based on similar reasons, Holloway (1997, p.121) suggested that separate pilot studies may not be necessary in qualitative investigations conducted under the interpretive perspective. Since critical realists ‘share some common ground with the interpretive approach to interviewing’ (Smith and Elger, 2014, p.111), this argument may be extended to my study which is informed by a critical realist perspective. In addition, the semi-structured format of

interviews conducted for this study also provide some space for using an interview guide without proper piloting (e.g. piloting the questions on people as close to the respondents as possible). Apart from the provision of flexibility in the sequence and wording of questions, the interview guides in semi-structured interviews provide enough space to the investigator to cover all relevant aspects in their conversation (Kajornboon, 2005) and to probe necessary details which may emerge during the interview process. Perhaps, because of these reasons, some critical informed studies, even doctoral studies (for example see Quinn, 2006; Vorster, 2010), did not pilot interview guide while collecting data through semi-structured format.

With an aim to learn from the fieldwork, I scheduled the interviews with junior academics in the beginning while those with senior academics at the end of the field work. In this process, I also learnt that the wording of the questions should be retrospective to senior academics so that they can share their research experiences in detail. While other participants who had little experience in publishing research works were asked questions to know about the problems/ hindrances they have to face while carrying out a research project.

The interview guide (used for this study) was not piloted in line with the design of this study. However, the interview guide was used previously to investigate a similar topic for a conference paper (Lodhi, 2012) For this paper, the data was collected from a couple of people similar to the sample of this study. However, the interview data was analysed by following a non-realist perspective (Lodhi, 2012). This small-scale study, despite its different technique of data analysis, helped me polish my interview guide for this dissertation as it covered various possible aspects of the phenomenon of research culture. This may be considered as one of the reasons of why I did not conduct a full-fledged piloting for this study.

Further, prior to the fieldwork, the content of interview schedule was critically reviewed by my supervisor and a professor serving in the school of education, University of Leeds. Both senior academics validated the content of the schedule and considered it useful for the purpose of this study. Having said this, I fully recognize that above

measures/arguments may not completely compensate for a full-fledged piloting of the interview guide used for the study. Therefore, this may be considered a limitation of this study and readers may keep this in mind while interpreting the findings of the study. 4.4.2.2 Description of the Questionnaire

The final version of the questionnaire, used for the study, consisted of four parts. The first part comprised 85 closed-ended items deigned to collect the responses of the participants about individual, institutional and leadership factors. The responses of the participants about these items were collected on five point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (SD) to strongly agree (SA). Some items also had an additional (Not applicable) option. The second

section comprised 15 policies/ practices statements and one open-ended question. Overall, this section asked respondents to choose any five of the given 15 statements about the

measures for promoting research and also suggest any other measure, in response to the open- ended question, they consider important to promote research culture. The third section consisted of 18 items to collect information about the research outputs of the academies such as number of publications and conferences attended etc. Finally, section four gathered personal details of the respondents about age, gender, level of education and academic rank by asking four closed questions.