Data Collection and Management, Essay Example

Introduction

In this assignment, appropriate data collection and management methods for the proposed study on the dynamics of employee retention among sales personnel are identified and described. Choices for data collection techniques are justified and compared against options that were not selected. The data management procedure proposed is discussed, and the applicability of the NVivo software in this procedure is considered.

Data to be collected

Based on the research question, the data that would be most useful and relevant to the qualitative research plan being developed include perspectives of different people who are involved in the work setting on the dynamics behind salespersons’ high loyalty towards the company they are working for. This is because the primary object of investigation in this study is primarily what is inside the mind of salespersons which lead them to staying long in a workplace. Aside from this, another piece of useful data is the employee turnover rate, which may be asked from the manager of a company or may be computed from the employment records that the company possesses.

Data Collection Techniques

In qualitative research, Creswell (2007) identified a number of possible data collection techniques. These include interviews, observations, and document reviews. Interviewing is a data collection technique in which the researcher sets an appointment with the subjects of interest and meets them during that time. The researcher asks the subjects questions and follows up with more questions in order to clarify the responses of the subjects. Interviews can have a variety of forms. Interviews can be conducted with subjects one-on-one, or can be conducted with several people in a group, in which the interviewer can address a question to all members, or to specific members. In the qualitative study being developed, interviews are recommended as a suitable data collection technique. This is since through an interview the researcher may derive what a participant is thinking about. The reasons behind participants’ decisions to stay in a workplace can thereby be determined based from their own reflections. In selecting the interview as a method for collecting data in the proposed qualitative study, there are a number of issues that need to be considered. First among these are ethical issues. A research study must not intentionally or unintentionally cause harm to its participants. Considering the nature of the topic to be investigated, it is possible that during interviews, participants may reveal some information that is self-incriminating. For example, a salesman may reveal that the reason why he stays in the workplace is because he is attracted to a coworker, or to his boss. Such information, if revealed to other people who know the identity of the respondent may lead to backlash on the respondent’s reputation. Clearly, this is something that the study should watch out for. As such, the interview conducted should be one-on-one, rather than a focus group interview. Furthermore, possible respondents should be contacted privately, and sessions should be scheduled such that respondents would not be aware of who the other people are who are participating in the study. The next consideration is bias. In interviews, bias can come from a number of sources. There may be loaded questions that can influence a respondents’ answer to be biased. For example, “what are the things that you love about your job?” If this was the first question that was asked, then it generates the assumption that the respondent loves his or her job. A more appropriate question would be “Do you love your job?” followed up by the question on what the things are that one loves about one’s job. As such, questions should be examined for possible bias. In addition to this, the interview settings may also generate procedural bias from respondents. For example, if the interview is conducted during employees’ break times, employees may be pressured to think about the quickest answer to a question rather than seriously reflect upon his or her most genuine response. If the interview location was in an open space, then it is possible that the respondent would feel concerned about his or her privacy, and limit responses to safe answers that he or she believes would not get him or her into any trouble. As such, the researcher should prepare an interview setting in which the respondents would feel most comfortable, and would have enough time and space to answer questions to the best of their ability. This can be done by having respondents pick the schedule where they can be interviewed. The researcher can give them the basic guideline that the schedule should be one in which they can comfortably share an hour of their time to focus solely on answering questions. The researcher can designate a private location for the interview venue, or enable researchers to select an option in which the researcher would visit them in their home for the interview if that would be better for them.

Since the researcher does not want to make any theoretical assumptions at the start of the data gathering procedure, it is best to adopt an unstructured interview protocol. In such a protocol, base questions are formulated prior to the interview. These are very broad questions that respondents can take anywhere. The task of the researcher is to probe into the responses of the respondents and gather more data based on the direction that the respondent takes the interview. Some base questions that may be asked are “How do you feel about your work as a salesman?”, “How do you feel about your current workplace?”, and “What are your thoughts about workplace loyalty?” These are good questions because they are broad enough so that the respondents can be free to share their thoughts more openly, yet have enough bounds to enable the interviewer to keep the discussion within the topic at hand.

The observation method for data collection lacks the necessary personal viewpoint from respondents to be used as the data collection method for this study. While the researcher can technically observe participants during their work and can draw out notes which may be able to infer into why they are loyal to their workplace, these would all be mere assumptions heavily influenced by the researcher’s personal bias and previous theoretical constructs.

Data Management

In order to manage the data collection, all interviews would be audio recorded with the interviewees’ permission. These recordings would then be transcribed verbatim. If the interviewee does not permit a recording, then the researcher would have to take down detailed notes during the interview and spend an hour immediately after the interview organizing the notes. In managing data for the data collection process described in the previous section, NVivo can be used in various aspects of data management. Firstly, it can be used to store and catalog different data sources. Second, it enables the researcher to easily search for specific data, and identify common sources of where such data is found (such as who among the interviewers responded a certain way to a specific question). The software has a variety of data retrieval options, including capabilities for linking related documents and searching for specific passages or variations of such passages across different interviews.

Conclusion

It was found that the most appropriate data collection technique that should be used are unstructured interviews conducted with respondents in a one-on-one setting, at a time and place the each respondent prefers. It was determined that data should be managed by transcribing interviews and feeding data into NVivo where it can be properly cataloged and be ready for retrieval and analysis.

References

Creswell, J. (2007). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. Sage Publications, Inc.