As mentioned earlier, the strength of a case study is opportunity to use multiple sources of evidence which is called triangulation (Thiétart et al. 2001, 82; Yin 2003, 86 & 97).
Also in this study, three kinds of data are collected – documentation, archival records and interviews (Yin 2003, 85-89). General picture of the phenomenon is drawn by using a desk study method, i.e. sources are news articles, websites, statistical publications, surveys, the media reports of the companies and organizations involved in the phenomenon etc. Another part of the study is conducted using a field work research method. In this part 38 semi-structured and open-ended theme interviews (Yin 2003, 90) were made in Finland (32 interviews), Sweden (4) and China (2) between December 2008 and October 2010. The time-span when the actual cases have been occurred is from the mid-1990 to present day. The interviews were either recorded and transcribed or careful notes were made in cases when the interviewee did not allow recording or felt uncomfortable with it. This followed Yin‟s (2003, 92) recommendations for a tape recording of interviews. Altogether 22 interviews were recorded, but from 18 interviews with the Chinese interviewees only 6 were recorded. This may be due to the unfamiliarity and mistrust of the Chinese towards academic study interviews, as well as due to the old wisdom “do not disclose your situation to the outsiders” in Sunzi‟s famous text „Art of War‟ which is well-known and used to provide strategic views among the Chinese
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businessmen (Sunzi 2005, 88-91). Therefore, which was essential in this study with respondents from the Chinese companies, fully anonymity was provided for the interviewees in order to achieve as high reliability of the results as possible. Most of the interviews were face-to-face discussions, three were made by telephone. The interview languages were Finnish, Chinese and English, and the interview situations were designed so that at least one native Finnish or Chinese interviewer was present in the interviews where those languages were used. English was used to seven interviews when the interviewer and interviewee did not have the same native language. The author participated in 30 interviews. Finally, every interview transcriptions and notes were encoded with NVivo software that is developed for a qualitative data analysis according to their themes. In this way, data was easy to handle in the analyzing phase of the study.
The respondents were representatives of the Chinese companies operating in Finland, the local partners of the Chinese companies, and expert or investment promoting organizations of Finland, Sweden and China. The interviewees represent 28 companies and organizations: eleven Chinese companies, six partner companies and organizations (Finnish, Swedish or international), four commercial chambers/investment promotion offices (Finnish, Swedish and Chinese), and seven other organizations of expertise, including two ministries and one university. Of the interviewed people, 17 were Finnish, 18 Chinese and 3 Swedish (Table 4). Two Chinese persons were interviewed twice during the research process due to the novelty of their operations in Finland and in China in time of the first interview. The number of Swedish respondents is small but also other respondents were interviewed about their experiences of Sweden if they had any. In the interviews was found out that several respondents had first-hand information about investments in Sweden as they had been operating also there besides Finland. The interview form was the same also for Swedish respondents, Finland had just replaced by Sweden in the questions.
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Table 4. Number of interviewed persons classified by nationality and type of company/organization.
Nationality Type of organization
Chinese companies 3 11 0 14
Commercial chambers / Investment promotion offices
Partner companies /organizations 4 1 2 7
Other expert organizations 7 1 0 8
Total 17 18 3 38
Finnish Chinese Swedish Total
3 5 1 9
As mentioned earlier, this study is part of wider research of the Chinese FDI in the Baltic Sea region and the original interview form (Appendix 1) contained also other questions concerning issues outside of the focus of this study. The form was divided into seven themes: „background information‟ (of company and investment), „general information about the target country or region‟, „relationship with the public sector‟, „relationship with the local partner company‟ (if any), „relationship with the companies and market‟,
„employees‟ and „future‟. The core questions for this study were under themes „general information about the target country or region‟ and „relationship with the companies and market‟. The most of questions under the first theme were design to find out why Finland was chosen for the host country for the particular FDI and to compare Finland and its neighbouring countries as hosts for FDI. These are essential to answer the second and third research questions. Under another theme the core question was “what was the main motive to invest in Finland?” which refers straightly to the first research question.
However, also many other theme area questions in the question form are important for this study because they shed light on the important background information about the Chinese FDI phenomenon and the reasons to invest in Finland. For example, the role of the public sector behind the FDI decisions is essential to know, especially in the case of the Chinese investments as was discussed in the literature review.
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