Building of rapport was a great concern for this research study. The researcher was well- aware of these issues before entering into the field. According to Bartkowiak (2012), good communication and interaction level between the researcher and participants’ helps to collect data more effectively in qualitative studies. He further suggests that building of trust and understanding helps to disclose secret information. Without gaining the trust and understanding, the participants might produce fabrication and do not prefer to share the exact information which could be a great risk to the reliability of the data (Molden, 2011). Therefore, building of rapport with the participants was crucial to achieve as the interaction time and level between both interviewer and researcher was limited. According to Guillemin and Heggen (2009), the purpose of the building rapport is to reveal rich data while
122 maintaining a good level of relationship and respect between the researcher and participants. The participants’ when felt secure will adapt into the conversational environment and reveal more sensitive information. For building of the rapport, the researcher undertook following measures
One of the most important factors was attaining the trust of participants as anonymity between the researcher and participant could have created hurdles for revealing sensitive information. According to Churches and Terry (2007), trust is difficult to maintain in qualitative studies. Trust is mostly related to securing the information afterward the interview. The participants get a sense of worry that how the information or experiences would be used later on in the research. The researcher believed that for overcoming this challenge, the first step is to formally invite participants for contributing to the research study. The researcher for gaining trust of the participants undertook following strategies,
o Sending an invitation to participants from university’s student email account with the attachment of participant information sheet, consent form and abstract for the research. The researcher assumes that this would have created a factor of trust on the participant side. Similarly, few of the participants in response got back to the researcher and mentioned that they would require a hint of what would be inquired of them during the interviews; recognising if they are the appropriate persons or not. In this regard, the researcher discussed with the supervisory team and then suggestions were provided in the form of the basic interview theme line with the abstract of the study. For example, discussion of issues and challenges in Virtual-Agile project environments, how the organisations deal with risk management in such environments, what kind of techniques and methods they prefer. The
123 researcher observed that this enhanced participants’ interest about involving in the research study and they felt more confident about their contribution. o Similarly, respecting all the participants, being flexible, genuine and sincere
helped to encourage rapport for this study. Keeping an environment of respectfulness was the first priority of the researcher as he thought that participants’ may get affected by this element especially. The researcher tried to remain conscious during conversations and respectfully acknowledge the responses of participants. Agreeing on the right time for the interviews was a bit tough for the researcher as he had to chase his participants most of the time. In this regard, the researcher fully gave the authority to the participant to decide on a time of his/her choice and then get back to him when ready. If the participant was not able to get back, the researcher sent him/her a gentle reminder of the participation in the study.
o Similarly, during the interviews, the researcher tried to be an active listener and responded to the participants’ viewpoint by giving verbal cues, such as yah, right, absolutely (Hull, 2007). Then keeping an eye contact also helped the researcher to boost rapport building process. Similarly, almost in all the interviews, the researcher warmly welcomed and provided gestures of gratification to his participants so that the discussion environment may become more useful.
The researcher believes that during the data collection phase he tried to neglect resistance to increase the rapport. This was done by showing gestures of thankfulness and respectfulness. Similarly, there were also few negative cases where the researcher didn’t get access to the participants. This may be the reason of lack of understanding and trust which the researcher was not able to show to his respondents. One of the examples is the researcher tried to get in contact with an experienced participant who was based in the
124 United Kingdom. The researcher chased him for 2 years but couldn’t get access to him. The participant always committed to participate in the research study but in reality he didn’t fulfil his words. The researcher tried to get back to him overtimes by requesting him to allocate time, date and a location of his choice, but at the end it was of no usefulness. Similarly, another case was approaching the participants through LinkedIn which is a well-known professional networking forum; where different professionals can interact and look at each other’s portfolios. The researcher was not able to get any response from that platform; he believes that may be due to lack of trust as no one wanted to share information. Similarly, one of another example can be the interviews in Germany, where the participants preferred to undergo discussion over phone rather Skype. The researcher believes that this might a reason of intercultural breaks where some cultures do not prefer to get fully involved with an anonymous person. But the outcome of both the interviews was found satisfactory as the researcher fulfilled rapport criterions due to which he observed that interviews were rich, lengthy in duration, where the participants contributed to the best of their experiences.