Thank You and Farewell

This journey of this research blog has come to an end today. At the beginning, I was not that interested in writing up for the blog and share my experiences with others. As people said, research is a lonely journey. However, after writing several blogs and seeing people come and read the things you write, it gives me encouragement. Even though we are all doing different kind of researches and we cannot be each other’s best buddy in PhD, knowing someone is also going through this journey can be a big comfort. We share our thoughts and thinking. We learn from each other’s struggles and successes. It is this course, which makes us a bit closer to each other as a researcher, and it is this blog, which shares some of our research experiences. Therefore, thank you Kerry for building this platform and thank you, all my fellow researchers for posting some many insightful articles to me to gain knowledge and experiences. I will cherish this experience and I am really glad I can take this course with you guys this semester.

With love,

Cathy

Reflection on Conducting Interviews

After conducting the interviews for the interview exercise and my project, the experiences are quite different between the two. Thus, I was trying to figure out the reasons for that and this might give everyone some insights about how to conduct interview.

For the interview exercise, we have to find three international students in CBE to ask them about their experience in ANU. We did the interviews in one afternoon all in ones and the process was not very enjoyable. Firstly, as we were trying to randomly pick students in CBE, we literally just stop one student and ask them whether they are willing to take the interview. Then, bringing them to one lecture theatre and conduct the interview. During the interview, you had to keep asking questions to encourage them not to stop talking. Otherwise, they would just give you very short answers or sometimes just become silent. This was frustrating as if we were trying to come up with a lot of questions, the interview was highly driven by us and it seemed like we were pushing and limiting their answers to what we would like to get. These aspects made the interviews seem to be a bit unreal. Sometimes, the interviewees seemed to not understand your questions and the answers was just not related or relevant to your questions. Finally, these interviews were relatively short as well as you could sense that for some interviewees, they didn’t really take the interview serious and were not willing to think about your questions carefully before answering it.

I think there might be several factors that can explain this experience.

• Because this is an ad hoc interview, the interviewees are not prepared to be interviewed. Even though they consent to do the interview, they might not be willing to put to make effort into this interview.
• Some of the students may not think before they talk or have a relatively poor logic while talking which makes the conversation a bit hard to follow.
• Some of the students might feel not very comfortable to talk to a stranger (e.g. due to culture reason), thus they might just talk for the sake of talking and we cannot get useful data.
• We conducted the interview in seminar rooms where it mict ght create a environment that makes students think they are in a lecture and this might constrain them talking.

In contrast to the practice, the interviews for my projects were such a good experience. The interviewees here are independent directors. As I had sent them emails to arrange the time before the meeting, they were aware of the brief content of this interview. I conducted the interview in cafes where we sat down and had a coffee. During these interview, I did not need to ask a lot of questions as they could start talking by themselves and carried on for a long time. I could just pick up the points I needed and occasionally asked some follow-up and confirming questions. All interviews last about an hour and whole process were very smooth.

I have summarised some key points for these interviews:

• The interviews are arranged in advance which gives both the interviewer and interviewee time to prepare the interview.
• The directors generally talk coherently with a structure, and sometimes, give relative examples to illustrate their points. There is a large quantity of information contained in their responses.
• The directors have a lot of industry experience where they have developed good interpersonal skills. Thus, they might know how to talk in public and/or do interviews which they are comfortable with what they are talking about.
• Café can be good place for interview as it creates a causal atmosphere, which makes the interviewees more approachable. Also, having something to drink during the interview (especially long ones) can help the interviewees to get rid of dry throat from talking for too long.

In conclusion, there are many things might affect your design of interview strategy, for example, the characteristics of interviewee (talkative or quite?), the arrangement, the place of choice and etc. Hopefully, by sharing my experience, more people will get some insights into how to conduct a good interview. Finally, just go and get your hands dirty. Wish everyone have a good time interviewing!

Quotes or Story? A Discussion about How to Use Interview Data

In last Thursday’s class, Kerry let us do an exercise to use both quotes and story approaches to make an argument to support your propositions. It was fun and I learnt a lot from it. The data used is from the interview about the experience of ANU-CBE students.

Quotes

Proposition:

Positive feelings will be resulted if the current experience is more satisfying than the previous one.

Quotes:

 “ANU is a good uni(veristy). It’s more challenging than the first year uni(versity) I go to back home.”

“The coursework is a bit more challenging and also there is (are) more test…(More assignments) make you understand things more.”

“more group assignment(s) and group work(s) between the classmates” and “more opportunit(ies) to talk with the lecturer.”

Argument:

Without any hints to compare their previous experiences, interviewees unconsciously evaluate their current experience in relation to their previous ones using comparative words like “more”. For example, this is well-evidenced in the first quote. These are the first two sentences the interviewee said when been asked about their experience in ANU. Apparently, being more challenging constitutes one of the main reasons why she had a positive experience at ANU and this is in relation to her university experience back home. 

Story

Claim:

Negative feelings result from dissatisfactions as the current one underperforms the previous one.

Story:

Student B is doing Master of Business who finished his Bachelor degree in the University of Adelaide. When he talked about his experience in ANU, he was so angry and speaking with a strong tone to complain about some of his lecturers. Basically, what he said is that the lecturers failed his presentation and essays without giving convincing and sense-making reasons.  He also carried on and told us two similar stories about his friends to express his dissatisfaction and emphasis that he was not the only case. When asked if these things had happened before, he answered:” Definitely not happened! At least, I got the lower lower mark (the lowest mark I got), on (in) my undergraduate (in University of Adelaide) is 50… So I am really confused with ANU’s teacher… how do they think about the marking criteria… it’s very strange!”

Agrument:

It is clear that his past experience of lecturers of always giving pass mark is set as a reference point of his current experience. Because the current experience does not meet his benchmark, he feels very disappointed and frustrated about his experience at ANU. This dissatisfaction is expressed through the tones and attitudes during the talking and he also tried to emphasis on his point by making people feel he is not a single/only case to make his accusation believable.

I found that comparing the two approaches, story approach is better in expressing a point of view. By providing the backgrounds and contexts of the person and the interview process, it can help readers to understand your intention and think along the line of your arguments. Whereas, using a single or multiple quote may be a bit hard to follow as readers might not understand why the interviewee will have such opinion/attitude at the time. Also, by providing only one line allows more discretion for readers to have different interpretation as you do. However, we need to be cautious when we use story as if there is too much information provided, the story can be messy and redundant and readers might not be able to catch the kick in your story. 

A Taste Of Fieldwork

Irvine, H. and M. Gaffikin (2006). "Getting in, getting on and getting out: reflections on a qualitative research project." Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 19(1): 115-145.

After reading Irvine and Gaffikin (2006) about the methodological analysis on fieldwork studies, I seem to start to get a sense of what fieldwork is like. Very different from quantities study, qualitative study has its advantage of capturing the dynamic and contextual complexity of “living” organisations. It can reflect multiple realities, which helps researchers to understand what it is like for people in a particular situation. Whereas, quantitative study only can examine one reality and it is harder to draw a complex picture maybe due to e.g. the statistical limitations. There are several points they need to be aware of before going into the field. First, as mentioned before, we need to recognise there might not be one single answer. Second, the researcher needs to keep a “right” distance with the field in order to observe and maybe participate in the field, but still can be reflexive and see the big picture. Thus, reflexivity is the third important criteria. Fourth, after the fieldwork, as a researcher, we need to reconcile the evidences you gather in the field and procedure a complete story which other people can see how this story can support your research objective. Last but not least, doing fieldwork need researchers to meet high ethical requirements as confidentiality, anonymity and etc. as this kind of research requires strong human interaction and needs good delicacy when handling some sensitive situations in the field. 

An Update On My Project

Objective

My project intend to take an qualitative approach to investigate what are the roles of independent directors and the process of how they make decisions using primary data. It is an exploratory study to try to theorise the behaviour use and go beyond agency theory. It is because prior quantitative studies made some effort to examine the influence of independent directors on performance using agency theory and find mixed results. The problem here is they only focus on drawing the statistical relationship between independence of the board and firm performance without carefully considers what do BODs actually do in practice.

My potential theoretical contribution is to develop a theoretical framework that combines both agency theory and other relevant theory, which can be used to guide future research. Also, by employing a qualitative study can allow me to get access to first-hand data to explore what actually happened in practice, instead of using archival data as proxies and this might be a first-step attempt to reconcile the inconsistent findings in the prior literature.

What have I done?

I have discovered two competing theories from the sociology literature to try to explain the decision-making process of independent directors in practice.

The first theory is institutional logic theory. Institutional logic theory suggests institutions provide social actors with a highly contingent set of social norms, where behaviour is driven not by a logic of consequence but by a logic of appropriateness through formal education, legitimating authorities and professional networks. The key here is it is the social norms and corporate cultures that shape the behaviours of individuals. In corporate governance content, both executives and independence directors have similar experiences (education and field experiences) and networking. All these shapes the ways how independent directors gain power and determines how you may act in the company. Coming from similar backgrounds, it is unreasonable to suspect independent directors will act differently from executives.

The second theory is institutional entrepreneurship theory. Institutional entrepreneurship theory suggests actors who are not truly embedded by the institutional logics already in place may seek to make change; however, condition on certain personal and social criteria. There are three main criteria mentioned in the theory, institutional content, personal properties and relation building. Institutional content suggest an institutional entrepreneur need to be in a powerful position to hold the power of reward and punishment system. So in corporate governance content, being an director might be a powerful position. But whether it is powerful enough? What might be the optimal number of independent directors? What if, the strategies between independent directors are different? All these questions need to be explored. The second factor is personal properties. It is suggested that institutional entrepreneurs should possess special characteristics, qualities and abilities which distinguish institutional entrepreneurs from others in the field, and allow them to envision and promote alternative arrangement. For example, reflexivity, which makes people realise and initiates a change; unique political and social, the ability to communicate with others in the field using normative and interest based appeals. So in corporate governance content, do independent directors possess these characteristics? Finally, using the resources and personal intellects, an institutional entrepreneur can develop new relations among actors, collaboration, coalition and alliance. In corporate governance content, what is relationship should be? Very close or keep some distance?

The research method I’m using is to interview some independent directors in the field and I have done one already. I have gathered some interesting evidences, which supports one of my theories.

What are still left to do?

First of all, I’m arranging more interviews with some independent directors to get more evidences.

Second, I need to put all interview notes and recording together to write a transcript. Then, start to analyse the results.

Finally, I can write up my project in time and it will be the best day of me life. J