Desarrollo del proyecto

Overall, the triangulation of data with the case study was achieved at both production and the company levels. At the production level, it was achieved by interviews with key decision-makers of each production, including the executive producer, Commercial Director, Business and Legal managers, and the Managing Director, where necessary. At the corporate level, it was achieved through cross-department and cross-function interviews with both junior and senior members and the staff and freelance production members, as well as studying the company data and trade press and reports, and random data collection from newspapers and the internet. A final case study report was also submitted for the gatekeepers’ review and no further questions ensued. There was one hundred per cent response rate to my interview invitations for the case study. See Appendix 9 for the full list of interviewees.

4.2 Data Analysis and Presentation

The Interpretative Approach

As the semi-structured interview data form the bulk of the empirical data in this research, this qualitative study is characterized by an interpretative, subjective analytical orientation. However, the interpretative approach to qualitative research bears the burden and potential of subjectivity (Holliday 2007). Therefore, my awareness of taking a step back and taking a ‘stranger’ approach (Schütz 1971) was present throughout the research, so as to achieve a mutual co-construction of meaning in the real world, and especially, to show how the research is constructed

in relation to the research setting, to ensure its cultural and ideological appropriateness (Holliday 2007:15)

The interpretative approach taken for the data analysis in this research can be said to consider both deductive and inductive dimensions, yet it is more inductive than deductive. Firstly, the collection and analysis of the empirical data aims to acquire first-hand knowledge of the phenomenon under study, from the individual actors involved, through to a more inductive exploration, so as to allow implications, meaning and patterns to emerge, and in order ‘to allow the differentiating characteristics of the groups to be discovered rather than presumed’ (Holliday 2007:12).Such an inductive and interpretative approach involves ‘the constellation of procedures, conditions, and resources through which the reality is apprehended, understood, organized, and represented’ (Gubrium and Holstein 1997:14).

Secondly, this research provides both theoretical and empirical inferences, so as to explain the real circumstance and to develop generalizations and implications for the research topic (Yin 2003). However, rather than coding in any strict sense, with the utilization of the CAS analytical framework, I essentially utilized schematization and grouping (Eskola and Suoranta 1998) in building my subjective interpretation of the data. The data-analysis began with the identifying and bundling of the keywords which seemed to be used by my interviewees frequently in connection with the level-specific themes and concepts, I then progressed to integrate those prominent keywords of clusters into thematic entities relating to particular research questions (Miles and Huberman 1984) that emerge from the multiple-level analysis. Such a data-analyzing process was more

inductive than deductive, in that the theoretical codes or themes of the CAS framework were taken only as metaphorical, in making sense of the network complexity. Moreover, I have sought to allow the empirical data to offer its own view of the network phenomenon. In addition, the findings from the individual-level data guided the analysis of the higher-level data, and consequently, the exploratory approach helped me to comprehend the emergence of the networks in a more holistic way. Overall, such levels-and-themes-based analysis proved to be manageable for the large volume of empirical data collected for this research. However, it has been carried out without the aid of any data-coding software package, and was achieved ‘manually’ by using Microsoft Word.

All the interviews conducted in this research were digitally recorded, with the consent of the interviewees. The interviews were then transcribed verbatim in Chinese (interviews in Taiwan) and English (interviews in the UK). For the interviews in Taiwan, due to the huge amount of interview data (all fifty-one interviews) and limited time and resources, translating from Chinese to English was impracticable. Therefore, the coding of the interview data was carried out both in Chinese and English transcripts, and I only translated those selected extracts from the Taiwanese interviews into English for the purpose of the thesis. In such cases, I translated the meaning that best matches the specific context of the conversation.

The ethical guidelines for research concerning anonymity and confidentiality were applied throughout the collection, analysis and presentation of the empirical data.

In order to protect the anonymity of the interviewees, all interviewees were indicated by their job titles in the thesis. As for the interviewed producers, with the two case study company, they will be indicated with their title as Producer or Executive Producers (EP), followed by the production case they were responsible for, for example: Executive Producer/ Drama.

Summary and Continuation

In this chapter, I have explained the choices that I have made and the main research tasks. I adopted a qualitative research methodology, which enabled me to answer my research questions. Based on these themes of the CAS framework, the main findings of the empirical study and the outcome from the bottom-up and from the three levels of analysis are presented in Chapter 5, 6 and 7.

Chapter 5