Descripción de Inversiones

Q sorting can occur with either face-to-face or online administration. Both options provide their own advantages as well as challenges. With face-to-face administration, the task becomes resource intensive and more time consuming, however it remains the more preferred method as the researcher is sure that the participant engaged with the Q set and can elicit more information with the interview (Watts & Stenner, 2012). With the online administration, although it is less demanding on time and can be administered in the absence of the researcher, there is no guarantee that the participant truly engaged with the Q sorting task and there is no post-sort interview to gain in-depth insights into responses. The study therefore chose to combine administration methods where the online freeware of Flash Q was used to optimise time taken to complete the task as well as other resources needed. The presence of the researcher face-to-face provided the advantage of the interview to probe and gain deeper understanding into the perceptions of each participant.

Each participant was handed a laptop with Flash Q loaded onto it. They were provided with a participant number to enter the programme to begin the task. This number was incorporated into their participant identification number to maintain their anonymity in the research report. The programme requested the participant to read the statements and sort them into three piles reflecting a pile of those with which she agreed with, a pile of the statements she disagreed with and a pile of the statements she held a neutral opinion on. Secondly, the participant was required to rank order the statements on a grid shaped like a normal curve. After scrolling through the agree pile, a participant was asked to select the two statements with which she most agreed with. These were placed in the blocks under +5. The participant was asked to do the same with disagree pile and placed two statements under -5. This process was repeated for all the columns (+4, -4, +3, -3, and so forth) including the neutral column. The figure below is an illustration of the grid which was completed.

Figure 1. The Q sort grid -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 (2) (2) (4) (4) (5) (5) (6) (6) (7) (7) (9)

Once all statements had been placed on the grid, the participant was asked to assess the full grid and rearrange the statements until she was satisfied. Each statement number in each cell was then recorded for later use in data analysis. Throughout this process, the participant was questioned regarding certain choices she had made for the statements. Thirdly, the participant was probed as to why she had selected the statements at the two extremes of the grid. This was followed by the demographic questionnaire which required participants to indicate their age, marital status, whether they have dependents, qualifications, years of experience, designation in their current position and occupation level. This information was used to provide further insight in interpreting the responses of the participants.

The final aspect of the session involved the meta-stereotypes section. This section consisted of six questions where the purpose of the questions was to measure the degree to which respondents believe the other group to hold negative stereotypes towards Black women. Some of the meta-stereotypes were borrowed from a previous study on meta-stereotypes (Finchilescu, 2010), and were measured as bipolar adjectives on a 6-point semantic differential scale (Finchilescu, 2010). Analysis conducted on the scales revealed that the instrument had a good internal consistency with a Cronbach also coefficient of .74. Participants were required to respond to the question “1 anticipate White male colleagues to feel the following towards me as a Black female”. A low score on this scale would indicate that the individual believes

The meetings were not anticipated to take more than half an hour. Considering the occupational level of participants which resulted in them having bust schedules, it would have been challenging for them to avail long periods of time to meaningfully engage in the study. It was therefore feared that any duration longer than 30 minutes would jeopardise the number of participants willing to take part in the study. Interestingly however, it is worth noting that once the participants started with the task, the content of the statements evoked high emotions and passion, and the meetings lasted anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours. Data collection took longer than the six weeks which were initially expected (data was instead collected over a period of 6 months) due to the overall challenge in finding the desired number of participants to complete the P set.

When all Q sorts had been collected, data was entered into analysis freeware called PQ Method following the instructions outlined by Schmolck (2014). The data on meta-stereotypes was analysed using the IBM SPSS 23 programme. Due to the small sample size, non- parametric testing was conducted which included the Mann-Whitney U test to make a comparison of differences in ranks. The Mann-Whitney U test was the non-parametric version of the parametric independent samples t-test (Pallant, 2007). Thematic content analysis was used to analyse the responses from the interviews (Smith, 2000).

To assist in the understanding of the interpretations and findings, an in-depth explanation of the statistical analysis is described in the results section (chapter 4). The step- by-step explanation will reveal the transition from Q sorts to factors using correlation and factor analysis, the next transition from factors to factor arrays using a weighted average of significantly loading Q sorts and lastly the transition from factor arrays to factor interpretations (Watts & Stenner, 2012).