The interviews were conducted during the five months from August, 2010 to December, 2010. The interview protocol asked the participants to explain the meanings of occupational stress in their work/life, identify the sources, and state the strategies used to cope with occupational stress. At the beginning of the interviewing process, interviews were unstructured and informal and emergent themes were identified. Subsequent interviews were guided by the analysis of previous interviews. Questions and follow-up probes were adapted and generated to ascertain more data pertaining to the phenomenon of occupational stress. The taped-recorded interviews each lasted between 30-90 minutes. The first 10 minutes of the interview time was spent
establishing an understanding and rapport with the interviewees. The interviews began with demographic questions, because demographic factors, such as age, marital status, education, family, working experience and personal life experience are likely to influence the experience of occupational stress of the participants.
The second session of the interviews focused on approaches to perspectives of occupational stress. The questions were developed to obtain interviewees‟ opinions relating to the meaning of occupational stress, causes, coping strategies and cultural factors influencing experiences of occupational stress. The questions are open-ended, free from professional jargon, and are designed to be neutral rather than value-laden. The questions are as follows:
1. Occupational stress is prevalent in our everyday lives because many people feel stressed. In thinking about your daily life, what does occupational stress mean to you?
2. What are the things that contribute to the stress in your life?
3. From your perspective what are the problems you see working in your field? And the major frustrations of this job?
4. For what reason do you think is the most stressful factor for you? 5. In your opinion, are there ways to overcome it?
The questions were piloted with a set of three interviews to ascertain that they were easy to understand. The three pilot interviews were conducted with personal contacts with PhD Vietnamese female students at Curtin University, who are lecturers in higher education institutions in Vietnam. They met all criteria of the research sample and voluntarily took part in the pilot interviews. The interviews gave the researcher the opportunity to review and refine the interview questions and improve data collection methods (Patton, 2002), and they also gave the investigator opportunities to modify and/or change questions.
During the pilot interviewing, the participants were allowed to talk as much as possible and without interruption about their interpretation, experiences of occupational stress and coping strategies. Each of the three interviews lasted at least 30 minutes in Vietnamese and was taped with the participants‟ permission, and then they were translated into English by a PhD Vietnamese student who was undertaking doctoral research at University of Western Australia and who was an English lecturer in Vietnam. The translated data were returned to participants to verify the accuracy of the transcription. The initial analysis was undertaken manually and were then analysed on Nvivo 8.
Interviews for the theoretical sample were conducted to gather information from individual participants‟ perspectives about the investigated phenomenon – occupational stress - at an agreed place and time. All participants were met at their faculty by the researcher to invite them to take part in the study. Face-to-face contacts were the best way to obtain their agreement and they were very necessary to develop an understanding and trust between the academic women and the researcher, rather than through other forms of contact such as by phone or email. Moreover, face-to-face contact is at the core of Vietnamese social interactions and not meeting face-to-face is considered disconcerting (Dalton et al, 2002). The initial face-to-face contacts were very important in the Vietnamese context to establish good rapport with the participants and to demonstrate respect for them in order to allow the interviews to commence in the best, and the friendliest, possible way to ensure that the participants would contribute significantly to the success of the interviewing process. The researcher spent considerable time contacting academic women to ascertain their ability and willingness to take part in the study and to make appointments to conduct interviews.
All interviews were conducted in Vietnamese. Seventeen of the interviews were conducted at a café, drinking hot or ice coffee, on Saturdays, Sundays and workdays, when the participants had no teaching commitments and there weren‟t any interruptions. Especially, and surprisingly, a woman academic participant, identified here as VTBT, took her husband to the café to listen to her describe the pressures and stress she
suffered from her career, relationships with her husband‟s family and interface between career and family. The researcher took much time to establish rapport with them, especially with the interviewee‟s husband; ultimately the interview was conducted with the request that the interviewer keep all information confidential. This couple also required the researcher not to record the first twenty minutes of the interview in which they discussed their personal life, job of the husband and their relationships before their marriage.
Another interviewee (HNT) told her husband and parents that she had a casual meeting with her colleagues at the faculty, although, in reality, she went to a café to conduct an interview with the researcher on a heavily rainy evening. She agreed to participate in the study with the help from a mutual friend who is also her colleague. Before the interview we didn‟t know each other and she made an appointment time and place with my friend who told me about this. Rapport was established quickly after the interviewer gave her the permission letter from her Principal, briefly described the research and the researcher, and suggested that, as the respondent and the interviewer were both lecturers they were in a unique position to understand this career more than others. The interview was stopped by a phone call from her husband because it was late, about 9.00 pm, so it had to be finished and, before saying good bye, she also promised to introduce the researcher to some of her colleagues who would also be willing to take part in the study.
Nineteen interviews took place at the participants‟ faculties in the staff room and six participants were interviewed in the Dean‟s office with permission given by the Dean at a scheduled break time. They arrived one hour before their teaching hours to take part in the interviews. Of these, some interviews were interrupted shortly by asking and answering some problems relating to their colleagues‟ work. Two interviews were conducted with four lecturers (two in each interview) because they wanted to listen to others‟ experiences and this was the first time they had participated in the interviews. Although the researcher convinced them to interview individually, they insisted that this was the best arrangement and they didn‟t have any convenient time to participate; moreover, they were young Lecturers, not familiar with the nature of the study, and did
not have any experience and knowledge of the investigated phenomenon. Thus, the interviewer asked each of them alternative questions in order not to bore them and it was difficult for them to divulge their family matters and occupational stress experiences from their career.
No interviews were taken place at the homes of the participants because some of them said that it was inconvenient for them to be interviewed as they were not rich; their two – storey houses are small (40 squares) and their parents and children were often at home which meant that they were not free to express their family matters, relationships, interactions between the family and career, impacts of the family on occupational stress, and experiences of occupational stress. Some participants feared the worst when in the interviews they referred to relations with their colleagues, first and foremost their managers, so that the interviewer assured them that their information would be kept confidential and the researcher wouldn‟t provide their managers with the interviews, even if this was a request made to the interviewer. Many participants expressed their gratitude to the researcher for being given a chance to tell the truth about their personal lives, their experiences and the vulnerable position of women academics in higher education - they had never confided their concerns to anybody in the past. Indeed, two participants moved the researcher to tears when they cried and referred to relationships with their husbands‟ families, especially with the husbands‟ mothers, which had a significant impact on occupational stress in their careers.
The total number of 42 in-depth interviews conducted with the theoretical sample was unstructured and commenced with an interview guide that consisted of questions and prompts allowing the academic women to express their experiences of occupational stress or any problems they felt were pertinent.
During the interviews, various probing questions were asked to explore and expand critical incidents and issues, and clarify as necessary, and these questions were led by the issues that highlighted their perceptions of occupational stress, sources, and coping experiences which they had previously presented. Some of probing questions were:
* Is this stress a negative factor in your life? If so explain how it is negative. * How has your job affected your lifestyle?
* What percentage of your time is spent doing your job?
* What do you believe is the most serious stress factor in your work? * Tell me about your life outside your work?
* How do you take care of your family? Does it have balance between your job and your housework?
* Do you think your work at home and your home at work? If so, please tell me something about work/life imbalance, conflicts? And how do you resolve them?
The interviews ranged from 30 to 70 minutes, with an average interview time of 37 minutes. The interviews in the open coding stage were anticipated to take approximately 30-90 minutes, however the participants were not forced in any way to fit into the allocated time. Of 20 interviews in this stage, 14 interviews lasted between 40 minutes and over one hour, and six interviews lasted only over 30 minutes. The average interview time in the axial coding stage was about over 30 minutes. Ten interviews in the selective coding stage lasted over 40 minutes on average, except three deleted interviews and one interview in which some sections were cut by participants‟ request.