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El documento de las Normas Urbanísticas del PDUSC, es fundamental en esta modificación

In document Mataró 2050 (página 185-187)

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4. El documento de las Normas Urbanísticas del PDUSC, es fundamental en esta modificación

Previously, it was argued that the qualitative case study was a proper method for this study, but it is also recognized that no method is perfect. This section intends to justify the choice of research method for this study, through discussing the quality of the paper. The two main measures to establish quality of a research paper is to ensure validity and reliability of the research (Yin, 2009).

It is important that the study is accurate, and establishing validity is therefore an important step of the study. There are three aspects of validity that has to be

considered, namely construct validity, internal validity and external validity. However, internal validity is not applicable to descriptive or exploratory studies (Yin, 2003), as is the case for this study, and will therefore not be considered.

Construct validity involves establishing correct operational measures for the concepts being studied, and this is often viewed as problematic within case studies as

researchers often let subjectivity influence the collection of data (Yin, 2003). Several sources of information can be used to verify answers given during the interview, which will enhance the construct validity of a study (Yin, 2003). These sources can be

interviews from other informants inside the same firm, to support the informants’ answers, or annual reports from the firms that confirms what the informants says. Two case firms with several informants were used to make sure that it was a variety within the interviews. Also, two other ways to enhance the construct validity is to let one of the key informants review a draft of the study (Yin, 2003), and take the interview back to the informants for a re-check (Denscombe, 1998). However, this was not desired by any of the informants. The informants said that they trusted us to handle the information right, and as long as their answers were anonymous, we were free to use all information and the citations we wanted for this study.

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External validity involves knowing whether the findings of a study can be generalizable beyond the case study performed (Yin, 2003). One way to enhance the external validity is to make sure that the informants represent a fair sample of a population, so that the results can be transferable to other parts of the population. In our study, the cases and the informants cannot necessarily said to be random, but was chosen after criteria explained in section 3.5 and 3.6. However, we do not consider this to affect the external validity to a great extent, as this study does not intend to provide generalizable

conclusion, but rather to but rather to provide an insight and ideas for further research. A further discussion of the generalizability of the results is given in chapter 6, about limitations of the results and further research.

The methodology needs to be described thoroughly in order to secure reliability of the study (Yin, 2009). A high reliability indicates that if the same study is to be conducted again with similar procedures, the researcher should arrive at the same results and conclusions as the authors of this paper. In order to strengthen the reliability of this study, the methodology is described in every step from the beginning of the research to the conclusion. Through a thorough described methodology, the reader should be able to learn and understand the assumptions and choices that are undertaken for this study, such that is possible to conduct the same research in the future and thereby obtain the same findings and conclusions.

The questions in the interview guide were written in order to capture what we actually aimed to explore. According to Yin (2003), the questions in an interview guide should be prepared for the investigators, not the informants. This is because the questions should be a reminder for the investigator of what needs to be collected, and should help

keeping the investigator on track during the interview (Yin, 2003). The interviews were extensively prepared in order to make sure that all informants gave answers to the same questions. The interview situations were also practiced several times to get a feeling of how the interview situation would be like.

As mentioned earlier, the interviews were transcribed after they were finished, and the transcriptions also involved some reliability and validity issues as the empirical data changed from being an audio recording into being written words. The transcriptions are the data that was used in the analysis, but as they are constructions of real life

interviews they may therefore not be accurate (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The measure to secure validity and reliability of the transcribed interview is that both of the

investigators checked the transcription against the audio record, to make sure that there was no confusion about words or sentences. The recordings were of excellent quality, and hence it was little uncertainty about what was said during the interviews. Another

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issue lies in the fact that oral language is different from written, and thereby it is hard to know the exact correct way of how to transcribe (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The focus should therefore be on what is the useful transcription for the research. The interviews for this study was transcribed word-by-word, but certain pauses, repetitions,

interjections and the tone of language was not included, as we did not see that as relevant for the analysis of the data.

In document Mataró 2050 (página 185-187)