Determinación de la estrategia organizacional

In both geographical contexts, we employ semi-structured, in-depth interviews to investigate our research questions. Semi-structured interviews are characterized by an interview guideline that consists of preformulated questions. The answers to these questions, however, are open-ended and allow both the interviewer and interviewee to expand the topics under consideration according to their discretion. Furthermore, the interviewer may enhance the interviewee’s motivation to respond in more depth by using probes (Schensul et al. 1999). This way, semi-structured interviews “combine the flexibility of an unstructured, open-ended interview with the directionality and agenda of the survey instrument to produce focused, qualitative, textual data” (Schensul et al. 1999: 149) and “offer us the most systematic opportunity for the collection of qualitative data” (Schensul et al. 1999: 164).

A similar procedure is used by Witzel (2000), which he refers to as problem-centered interviewing. Following Witzel, we use the following instruments: a short questionnaire in order to gather the most important social characteristics, an interview guideline with open- ended questions, the tape recordings of the interviews transcribed ex post, and postscripts that contain comments on the situative and nonverbal aspects of the interview as well as an outline of the topics discussed (Witzel 2000).

The short questionnaire, completed right after the interview, includes information on the interviewee’s year of birth, educational level, employment, civil status, children, as well as data on the partner’s level of education and employment situation, and finally, information about both families of origin, such as regional origin, civil status, educational degrees, employment, and siblings. The interview guideline is built around several thematic topics assumed to be of importance for the process under consideration, namely, the decision for cohabitation. These thematic topics were derived from previous studies and theoretical approaches used in the literature discussed in Chapter 2. We focus, for instance, on the influence of family members or more precisely of parents on the choice for cohabitation. Thus, a whole section of the interview guideline refers to that topic. During the process of data collection and data analysis, we expanded the guideline including aspects that came up during the interviews. We start the interview with the broad opening question: You are currently living with your partner. How did you arrive at that choice and why have you chosen to live together? Depending on the subject of the respondent’s answer, we then guide the interviewee to the following thematic sections:

A. The woman’s characteristics: family and youth, friends, education and employment history, economic (in)dependence, home leaving, previous relationships, children ….

B. The current relationship: beginning of the relationship, perception of the relationship, rituals, most important periods within the partnership, partner’s opinion, problems or conflicts within the relationship ….

C. Cohabitation: advantages and disadvantages of cohabitation, perceived differences between cohabitation and marriage, gender roles, meaning of cohabitation and change of significance during partnership, future expectations and plans …

D. Parents’ reactions: mothers’ and fathers’ opinions; discussions with parents; changes in family relations after entry into cohabitation, economic and non- economic interdependencies …

E. Friends’ reactions: discussions with friends, experiences of friends, reactions of colleagues …

F. Religion: importance of religion, importance for family of origin, impact on decision for cohabitation or marriage, conflict between cohabitation and religion, opinion of family …

G. Children: childbirth intentions, opinion on birth out of wedlock …

Women who entered a marriage after having experienced a previous cohabitation were requested to answer questions concerning the reasons and motivations for that choice as well. In addition, we focused on the wedding ceremony and reactions of family members and friends to the marriage. The last question of the interview was on the concept interviewees held about the family in general. On the one hand, this closing question served to find inconsistencies within the interview; on the other hand, it helped the respondent to reach emotional closure on the topics discussed previously. (See Appendix B for the complete Italian interview guideline.)

As to our sampling strategy, we intended to interview women aged between 25 and 40 who were cohabiting at the time of the interview or who married after a previous cohabitation. We also planned to talk both to mothers and childless women. The final dataset was intended to contain information on 25 to 30 women from each of the regional settings. In Bologna, interviewees were found through register data; they were contacted first by phone and then by mail. Furthermore, we used the snowball method (Goodman 1961) to complete our sample. For Cagliari, we used the snowball method only and started with contact persons at social and information services. We decided on this (additional) sampling procedure as cohabiters are relatively rare in Italy and not directly listed at the registry offices.12 Although the snowball method allowed us to collect information from a relatively hidden group of people, we are aware that this approach has some limitations. As Erickson (1979) emphasized, the snowball method produces biases in several ways. The initial sample and additional individuals are not found randomly; participants usually include

12 _{Although several municipalities (Turin being a forerunner) started to allow couples to register informal}

those individuals willing to cooperate and exclude those who instead withdraw from participation; further biases arise from the fact that interviewees might tend to “protect” friends by not referring to them and by the fact that respondents with a large network of friends will be oversampled, while more isolated persons will be excluded. We expect that our Cagliari sample is biased by the fact that we started our search for interviewees at social and information services, as some of these services engaged especially in women’s issues and referred to potential respondents who had dealt already with certain problems such as the status of women in society; as a consequence, these women were much more informed and sensitive to certain issues (for example, gender relations within the couple) than seemed to be the case in Bologna.

Data collection took place between May 2005 and May 2006 and resulted in 56 semi- structured, in-depth-interviews – 28 interviews in each of the two cities. Most of these interviews were from 50 to 60 minutes.

The interviews were conducted in Italian. The interviewer was of German nationality, a characteristic which possibly had some effect on the respondents’ answers. Some interviewees might have trusted a “stranger” less than someone of their own nationality and thus might have shown some reservations in sharing all their thoughts on the questions asked. On the other hand, interviewees might have had more trust in the interviewer exactly because of this fact; some people tend to be more talkative when discussing things with a completely unknown person compared to people who live in the same city or region. In addition, we noticed that the interviews greatly benefited from asking the women to provide a deeper description, as the interviewer knew less about the sociocultural context than they did. Maxwell (1996) emphasizes that it is impossible to eliminate the influence of the researcher, and that it is not within the aim of qualitative research to eliminate this influence but to understand it and to use it productively.

Since we interviewed only women who experienced cohabitation, we have no data on women who entered marriage directly, nor on those who never lived in a union. Given our sampling strategy, we furthermore lack information on women who desired or intended to cohabit, but nevertheless did not enter informal union. We thus cannot investigate why women made a decision against this choice or which factors drove such decision. Indeed, we cannot provide evidence on women who did not take into consideration the possibility

of entering a cohabiting union – possibly because it never seemed to be an option for them. However, as we interviewed also women who decided on marriage after cohabitation, we are able to analyze the reasons and motivations that drove the choice to enter a conjugal union after having experienced an informal union.