Expresión escrita

There were two stages to the data analysis. Before the fieldwork, I had collated

particular sets of the industry’s news articles from various online news sources (This

will be described in Chapter Five). This enabled me to collect data from various media as background information to discussions about the industry and the present situation. This analysis also allowed me to formulate a series of semi-structure interview schedules for the maritime organisations, shipping companies and seafarers before going into the field.

Data analysis is fundamental to my research here. Keeping the purpose of the study firmly in mind through the analysis process (Krueger and Casey, 2000), helps to facilitate the management of the data. It allows the researcher to eliminate any excess

and irrelevant material, so enabling him or her to navigate a large body of information and give meaning to the data.

Besides the main data generated by the recorded interviews, the grey industry literature and my field notes (which capture reflections about the interview, the settings and observations of non-verbal behaviour) added a valuable dimension to my analysis and construction of the data. Such additional dimensions were especially significant when analysing the group interviews, which should be understood in the social context of the group setting. In carrying out the data analysis, there may be a degree of bias arising from an interaction between the researcher and the data. The bias may be intrinsic in

the researcher’s selection and interpretation of the data (Strauss and Corbin, 1998), but

this may be minimised by using a trail of evidence (Krueger and Casey, 2000) which is the use of sufficient data such that the study’s conclusions may be independently verifiable by another researcher. The use of a variety of data would help to mitigate any inherent bias that may exist. Bearing these in mind, I tried to carry out my data analysis in as methodical and reasonable a manner as possible.

4.4.1 Documentary Analysis

In my documentary analysis of the grey literature, the text and content of news articles from the electronic archive of Lloyds List newspaper, which referred to the ‘shortage’ of seafarers for the years 1991-1992, 1997, 2001 and 2006-2008 were examined. The quantitative aspects of the content were largely relevant in the sense that the words which appear with greater frequency will be perceived as being more meaningful and are therefore deemed to hold more importance. While the content analysis of documents remains an important part in documentary research, I avoided paying too much attention to meanings within the texts and redirected attention to their relationship within a network of people, institutions and objects.

The common position of most social research holds that documents are static containers of information and it is human agents who wilfully excavate their contents for their own use. The main contention is that they serve solely and passively as sources of evidence (Scott, 1990; Hodder, 2000; Bryman, 2004). However, an alternative argument is that documents are active sources of data that have the ability to interact

with human agents and social institutions. Prior (2003) argues that that documents are fundamental to the social research process because they have agency (that is, they transmit ideas and affect the course and nature of human activity). They should not be treated merely as containers of content (that is, of words, images, information, instructions, and so on). He further argues that documents have a mutually dynamic relationship with human agents – in as much as they can impact on human agents and human agents, in turn, can impact on them. Hence, documents can be manipulated products of human activity, but are also consumed by human agents.

The object of the analysis of these articles was to determine the industry’s general rhetoric on the ‘shortage’ of seafaring labour via the print media. The reports are

pieces of the past and must be examined and interpreted in the context of history. Here, the content of the articles, how they were expressed, and the context in which they were expressed were significant. These conveyed the experiences of the industry and indicated the degree of severity of the crewing crisis. Most importantly, the data from the industry media supplemented the data collected from interviews and form an

inclusive representation of the industry’s experience of the ‘shortage’ of manpower and

the underlying factors behind this.

4.4.2 Interviews

All the interviews were recorded using a digital voice-recorder and then downloaded

onto the computer for subsequent transcription. The majority of my ‘shipping organisation’ and ‘shipping company’ participants either spoke English as their first

language or were sufficiently articulate in the language to comfortably express their thoughts and opinions in it. A significant number of the seafarers interviewed (from the Far East and Eastern Europe), however, did not have a comfortable grasp of the language to express all that they wanted to say, and transcribing these interviews was, therefore, a little harder. I transcribed the interviews myself even though it might have been faster to engage the services of a professional transcription specialist. This decision to proceed with the exercise of transcribing the interviews gave me the opportunity to familiarise myself with the data and allowed me to interact with it prior to analysing it. The transcription for each interview was time-consuming, especially for those held in noisier environments and for the group interviews. These had to be

repeatedly replayed in sections during the transcription to determine what was said. This difficulty was especially pronounced with the group interviews, for at times it was difficult to distinguish between the voices of the participants. On an average it took about 7 hours of transcription time for every hour of interview.

While transcribing the interviews, I was able to identify some preliminary themes and to create a list of codes for use in the NVivo data analysis software. This list was dynamic as well as changeable, and expanded as I progressed along the transcribing and analysis process; it also changed in its description and breadth. I chose to transcribe my interviews in stages, alternating it with analysis. The first set of transcriptions was for the maritime organisations and associations group, followed by those for shipping company participants and the interviews for the seafarers.

The codes were entered using the NVivo 8 software. Here, the interview transcripts

were imported into the programme and then ‘dissected’ for the assignment of codes. In

this way, relevant sections were sorted in coding categories. The approach that I took when analysing the interview data was to categorise them into themes and then cross- compared them. Moreover, while scrutinising the transcripts for various aspects of the

'shortage’, tentative codes were assigned to sections of transcripts as part of the process

of the analysis (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996). Although the data was examined to fit similarly themed sections to particular codes, these codes were not exclusively linked to sections and some sections were assigned more than one code. Initially, the codes were generally applied to relevant sections, but as the data analysis progressed they became more detailed. When the coding had been completed, I systematically compared sections of each code and examined them for cross-thematic links and patterns. At this stage, any segments which did not fit the codes accurately were either relegated to a sub-code or a new one was started. The cases that occasionally seem to be contradictory (for instance, opposing opinions of whether the ‘shortage’ is set to worsen) were important to guide the modification of the initial analytical themes. The value of the assistance of computer software for analysing qualitative data cannot be overstated since the programme makes the laboriously sorting out of a large amount of data and information manageable. It also makes the exercise of organising, coding and categorising data easier and more effective.

4.4.3 Reflexivity

Unlike quantitative researchers who typically attempt to dissociate themselves from the research process ‘qualitative researchers have come to embrace their involvement and role within the research’ (Golafshani, 2003, p. 4). In fact, such is the importance of reflexivity in qualitative research that the researcher is encouraged to be aware of how his personal values, methods, biases, and so on, affect and react to the social context around him/her. Almost all of the personnel I interviewed were individuals in positions of power (that is, managers, directors, and the upper management staff of shipping companies, maritime authorities and unions). Interviewing the elite presented the possibility that they, rather than I would be in control of the interview session. However, this did not materialise in the manner I had envisaged. Although in general, I was able to direct and guide the flow of the interview, I was subjected to their working schedules and priorities – meaning that, the interviews sessions were subject to many kinds of interruption, such as phone calls, email alerts, office matters, impromptu meetings and drop-in social calls from seafarers or industry contacts.

Even though I was acquainted with some of my participants, I was still considered by most others as an ‘outsider’ who is neither from the industry nor a former seafarer with personal experience concerning employment at sea. However, the vantage point of

being an ‘outsider’ makes it easy to form an unbiased representation of a situation

(Bryman, 1988). Moreover, my gender may have been an advantage (Pilcher and Coffey, 1996; Jarviluoma, et al., 2003) in the research process. The maritime industry is still considerably male-dominated and this was reflected in the nearly all-male ‘elite’ participants that I interviewed (with the exception of one female participant). Consequently, my informants were mostly indulgent and patient in their explanations to me (as a woman) about the situation.

As a researcher, it was important that I maintain an awareness of my position in the data analysis process. Here, Fontana and Frey (2000) warn against the danger of trying to maintain researcher neutrality in the understanding and deciphering of data: ‘Many studies using unstructured interviews are not reflexive enough about the interpreting process; common platitudes proclaim that the data speak for themselves, or that the researcher is neutral, unbiased, and ‘invisible’’ (Fontana and Frey 2000, p. 661). Any

preconceived ideas that I had about the alleged labour ‘shortage’ would have had a bearing on how I conducted the interviews and how I interpreted the data collected. The researcher must come to terms and recognise his/her own influence on the data, although this makes the nature of data analysis both problematic and complicated. I was aware that all the knowledge that I had acquired through my reading and speaking informally with individuals from the industry was constantly forming and reforming an impression of the labour market in my mind. I was also conscious that this constantly changing representation of the labour market impacted upon me throughout the research process, from the way I carried out my interviews to prejudicing the answers I was looking for To deal with this issue, I tried (as much as possible) to remain cognisant of this pre-disposition and consciously endeavoured to look for other perspectives.