Not all of the written documents used for this research were public documents. The Arts Council’s Wider Range of Voices report (Hatzihrysidis and Bunting, 2009) and the funding applications supplied were both unpublished. The case studies also provided internal reports. However, the data was all provided with full knowledge of how it would be used. There was the opportunity to remove any names or commercially sensitive data from these documents before I was given them. Although in the case of the Arts Council applications for funding this did limit the analysis of the data that was undertaken, it also limited the ethical issues in the use of the written data.
Ethical issues were more of an issue in the interviews, in relation to my background working in the arts sector and my role as an Arts Council board member while carrying out the data collection. This was specifically discussed both with the Arts Council and my research supervisory team before conducting any interviews.
Although my role gave me access to the internal documents and discussions, and was a practical aid in gaining access to interviewees there was some concern that it might influence the way people answered the questions, making people feel pressured to be involved in the research lest they jeopardise future applications or being wary of what they said in case it was fed back to the Arts Council (Hill, 2006).
It was therefore agreed that my case studies should all be organisations I had had no direct involvement with in my role at the Arts Council. I also endeavoured to never directly use my position at the Arts Council as a way of gaining access to the interviewees, except where pre-existing personal contact with the interviewee inevitably had an influence. In such cases I explained clearly at the start of the interview that the research was not
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being done on behalf of the Arts Council and that it would include a critical analysis of policy.
I was also aware of the need to create a safe environment for the respondents, both physically and psychologically (Ruane, 2005). To this end all interviews were held at the location of the respondent’s choosing, usually their place of work or at home. In exceptional circumstances some interviews were conducted by telephone, where the participant did not feel able to meet in person.
To put the respondents at ease at the start of each interview I explained the purpose of the interview and its structure and gave the respondent the opportunity to ask any questions. The respondents were then given an information sheet outlining the project and providing my contact details if they had any questions or concerns after the interview. They were asked to sign a form specifying if they wished to remain anonymous or whether they were happy for their name, job title, or both to be used in the research. Finally they were asked whether they wanted to see a copy of the transcript before it is used. If they ticked “yes” to this a copy of the full transcript was sent to them with an email asking them to say if there were any changes that they wished to make before the analysis began.
The signed consent forms served both to reassure the interviewee and to encourage them to be relaxed in the interview, with the option of retracting specific statements later if they so wished. This worked well as a method to encourage openness but it posed risks for my analysis, as the valuable evidence gained might have become unusable at a later stage. However, although most participants did tick the box to see a transcript, only a very small number sent revisions. In the event nobody asked for their interview to be removed from the analysis but I was asked to anonymise some.
For consistency all names have been removed from the analysis, except where naming the individual is crucial to the point being made, and they have given consent. This applies to Chris Smith, as former Secretary of State for Culture and the two Artistic Directors of Contact whose approaches are directly compared. All Arts Council and local authority staff are anonymised, as are all public participants.
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3.10 Conclusions
The purpose in the research analysis discussed in the following chapters is to examine the levers and barriers to policy implementation, in relation to
New Labour’s aims to increase participation in general and the growth in participatory decision making in particular. The aim is to see how practice is shaped by its context and by the individuals taking part.
The research I have undertaken investigates this through analysis of the agents involved in both policy and practice. It explores the organisational structures within which such agents operate, alongside an examination of the attitudes and beliefs of individuals surveyed, in order to assess the extent to which individuals create organisational structures or vice versa.
The case studies do not seek to create models of best practice or suggest that outcomes are replicable in other situations, but rather to examine different approaches and outcomes. That said some conclusions are drawn from the data about how effective participants perceive the processes they have worked through to be. Consideration is also given to whether people believe their values or skills have been changed by the process in order to examine the claims in the literature review that such processes build capacity (Lowndes, 1995).
The research focuses on analysing the similarities and differences between discourses from different individuals, and examines practice to understand the delivery processes of participatory decision making initiatives. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, informed by work from cultural theory on the role of the arts in society, from sociology on cultural democracy and from political science on power and decision making.
Mixed methods were used in data collection and analysis, including a study of grey literature from policy makers and the case studies, to examine the specific interpretation of the areas under investigation by different parties and shifts in thinking during the period of study. Surveys and interviews were also analysed, with a range of people from different perspectives both with a direct and indirect interest in the subject area. The data was analysed by identifying core themes and triangulation of different data sets.
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This included a qualitative narrative analysis of the development of case studies,from which it was possible to tease out specific issues.
A challenge throughout the research process was my role as an external and independent researcher, who retained some elements of insider status because of my past work in the arts and my continuing involvement with the Arts Council. As a result I had to wrestle with the implications for what I was doing for the creation of knowledge.
There is no doubt that this provided benefits in terms of access and ease of relationships with those interviewed. I was also aware not only from my reading of literature but also from my own experience of some of the questions that needed to be asked in interview and felt confident in probing and interpreting what people said. At the same time throughout I was mindful of the extent to which social desirability bias (Nederhof, 1985) may have influenced respondents who already knew me or my background. The following chapters present the findings from my research, first from the policy makers and then from the three case studies in turn, before a chapter synthesising findings from all four. These are used to draw conclusions for this thesis in the final chapter.