Designing research

Research design is conducted as quality research, at the end as well as at the be-ginning. Decision of the design and analyses may also be made together. Some of the designs are structured, some are plain interviews. When choosing the study, a relevant issue is to be practical and pick a study with a reasonable size and com-plexity so that deadlines can be kept. (Bodgen & Knopp 1992: 60)

Interviews can be used in qualitative research in two ways. They can be employed in conjunction with document analysis or with participant observation. Interviews may be a dominating strategy when collecting data. In all these situations, inter-view is used to gather descriptive data where subject’s own words are used. This allows research to develop insights on how the subject interprets his/her sights.

(Bodgen & Knopp 1992: 60-97)

Qualitative interviews have variations, depending on how they are structured.

Qualitative interviews offer the interviewer considerable latitude to pursue a lot of topics, and they offer the subject a chance to change the content of interview a bit.

If interviewer has too much control, the subject cannot tell her or his story per-sonally. (Bodgen & Knopp 1992: 60-97)

With semi-structured interviews you are confident and make sure that you will get comparable data across the subjects, but at the same time you may lose

under-standing on how subjects themselves structure the topic. (Bodgen & Knopp 1992:

97)

For this research, data collection was built using a unique way of combining a theme interview with two interview rounds, collecting in the first round the per-spectives of the quality and customer satisfaction inside the organization. After the results were analysed, a second interview round was performed to ask about reasons for deviations found. This duplex method combined to themes based on quality award criteria and the idea of quality service gap model is a unique way of using theme interview in data collection on service quality research.

Theme interview was done in two different interview rounds. Interviews were done in two different phases in every case organization. With these interviews, perspectives of customer satisfaction and quality were reflected in different de-partments of case organizations. The second interview round was based on the results of the findings on the first interview round. The main question on the sec-ond interview round was ‘why’. In the secsec-ond interview round, reasons for differ-ences in perspectives found between different departments were asked from the persons themselves.

Interviews in the case organizations were covering very comprehensively all white collar personnel. Through this was ensured that all departments were in-cluded and customer satisfaction and quality perspectives inside the organization and inside different departments were gathered. Interviews were covered case organization´ s as follows:

Service: All white collar people were interviewed including 3 persons.

Smoke pipe: All white collar people were interviewed including 12 persons from following departments: production (3 supervisors and production manager), pre-press department (2 supervisors), production planning (2 production planners), customer service (3 customer service coordinators) and dispatching (supervisor).

Telecom: From 14 white collar people 12 were interviewed with following de-partments: assembly department (2 supervisors), injection moulding (2 supervi-sors), painting department (supervisor), dispatching (supervisor), marketing (2 product managers, project engineer and sales assistant)

Research process in qualitative researches is based on the researcher setting a research problem to collect data. More detailed and accurate why-questions and answers to them can be found when data is on the analysing phase. One way to

find why-questions is to seek inconsistencies on the collected data (Alasuutari 1994: 189, 196). The idea of the second interview round in case organizations was based on this principle.

According to Hirsijärvi (2000:43), research interview is an interactive situation and characteristics for interview are the following:

- Interview is steered and started by the interviewer

- Interviewer is responsible for motivating interviewee during the interview - Interview is planned, practical and theoretical familiarity has been

exam-ined concerning subject studied by the interviewer.

- Interviewer knows his/her role in the interview

- Person interviewed should be able to rely on that facts he/she will tell dur-ing the interview are confidential.

11.3.1 Observation

Observation was used in this research to capture features of the organization cul-ture. As the culture is to a great extent about issues related to the perspectives which can only be captured by observation. These features include organization’s outlook, people’s habitus and other features which are not recorded and can only be found by observation.

Observation is a common method for all areas in science and it is in a way a nec-essary basic method of science. Observation can be used when we gather infor-mation related to either behaviour or linguistic issues. It can be reactive or non reactive which means that subject is or is not aware of the observation done. Ob-servation has been used mainly in quantitative methods but it has been used with success also in qualitative methods. (Hirsijärvi 2000: 36-38)

When your research questions are related to what people do, it is quite obvious that you watch them doing things. Essentially this is what observation as a method of collecting data involves. Participant observation is a qualitative method and emphasis is on discovering the meanings that people attach to their actions.

(Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill 2009: 288)

Observations provide a possibility to check what is actually reported on views. Interviews can be affected by the emotional or other similar state of

inter-viewee. Interviews are despite that permitting the observer to go beyond external behaviour and through this explore the internal state of the interviewers. (Patton 1990: 245)

11.3.2 Case study

The idea of case study is based on the assumption that case study can catch the complexity of a single case (Stake 1995: xi). Case study is appropriate when re-searchers want to cover contextual conditions, rely to multiple sources of evi-dence and cover contextual conditions (Yin 1993: xi).

Case study is also defined as a strategy which involves and includes an empirical investigation of a special contemporary phenomenon within its real life context using multiple sources of evidence. There must also be a clear interest to gain rich understanding of the context of the research. The data collection may include documentary analysis, interviews and observations. (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill 2009: 145-146)

11.3.3 Theme interview

In this study, the interview was used in data collection. More detailed information about the research process is given in the empirical part.

Theme interview is a half-structured interview method which is having a nature between open interview and form-based interview. This interview method is often used when phenomena and matters focused on in the study are not every day mat-ters for persons interviewed or when answers to these matmat-ters are facing the dan-ger of mistakes due to a lack of memory. Common features for theme interview are depth, specificity, wideness and personal context. (Hirsijärvi 1995: 35)

Personal context. Personal features and previous experiences of the persons in-terviewed should be cleared out. It is very important to clear out these issues be-cause these factors have an influence on the person interviewed and the meaning of question or phenomena answered will be stressed. (Hirsijärvi 1995: 36)

Specific. Being specific is a clear and very easy way to define reactions of per-sons interviewed. With depth, the aim is that the situation where the interview itself can help persons interviewed to describe the phenomena studied and its evaluative and cognitive meanings. At the same time, it should also be examined how much the person interviewed has really focused on the matter studied. (Hirsi-järvi 1995: 36)