Four data collection methods were used throughout this study. Two of these were common to the three case studies, whilst two additional methods were used in the primary case study. The two common methods were interviewing and document analysis. In the case of the primary research site, data were also gathered through the administration of a questionnaire and participant observation. This reliance on pluralist sources of information, using a variety of techniques, is consistent with the case study approach chosen for this study. This is also congruent with the researcher's philosophical assumptions discussed earlier. The multiple sources of data also allow the researcher to validate and crosscheck findings (Patton, 1 990).
3. 7. 2. 1 Interviews
Interviews are considered to be a pnmary source of information in case study research. Interviews can provide useful information that otherwise cannot be obtained, since this technique provides the opportunity to describe events related to a phenomenon (Tiemey & Dilley, 2002). According to McMillan and Schumacher
( 1 997), interviews are essentially vocal questionnaires that differ from other forms of inquiry in that they involve direct interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. Case studies in the qualitative tradition often advocate such an open approach and in some cases may even prefer an unstructured approach (Warren, 2002). However, a more practical approach is the semi-structured or "general interview guide approach" as advocated by Patton ( 1 990, p. 280). According to Gillham (2000), semi-structured interviewing is the most important form of interviewing in case study research. If conducted in a satisfactory manner, this type of interviewing can provide the richest single source of data. Semi-structured interview questions offer flexibility in the way questions are asked and responded to, as compared to more structured interviews. The 'naturalness' and the 'flexibility' of semi-structured interviewing, Gillham (2000)
further elaborates, can also appear to be "deceptively simple" (p. 65). However, the key to success in semi-structured interviewing is thorough preparation.
Based on the research questions, an interview schedule was developed for each case study site. These schedules consist of general questions related to QA and a set of specific questions that correspond to the specific questions formulated for each study site. Table 3 . 1 provides the number and distribution of participants to the three research sites.
Table 3.1
Research Participants and their Distribution to Case Study Sites
Categories of Secondary case Secondary case Primary case interviewees study 1 : ABC study 2 : USP study: MCHE
Institutional quality managers
Central quality body
staff contributors Academic (teaching) staff Total 4 5 9 8 1 0 4 1 1 1 2 1 2 3 3
(i) Interviews for secondary case one. In the New Zealand case study, a total of nine academic ' quality managers' were interviewed. These included staff from the ABC College in addition to staff from relevant central and national level bodies involved in QA work in the tertiary education sector. These institutions include the NZQA, ITP Quality, the Academic Audit Unit and the CUAP. The interview schedules for staff at the national level quality bodies were geared towards understanding the context within which QA evolved and operated, within the New Zealand tertiary education sector and their respective roles and functions, in relation to QA work. The interview schedules were therefore different for national bodies. Samples of these interview schedules are shown in Appendices C I -3 .
(ii) Interviews for secondary case two. The USP, being an institution responsible for
its own quality of programmes, had no comparative external quality validation body. Therefore, one set of interview schedules was prepared for participants from USP. This schedule of questions is included in Appendix D.
(iii) MCHE interviews. In the Maldives, semi-structured interviews were conducted
with three groups: ( 1 ) academic (teaching) staff members of MCHE; (2) 'quality managers' including heads of MCHE faculties and managerial staff at MAB; and 'policy contributors' group consisting of members of the MCHE Council, participants from the MOE, Ministry of Higher Education, Employment and Social Security (MHEESS), Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and the MAB were also interviewed. This latter group included what some regard as 'elite' members (Gillham, 2000; Odendahl & Shaw, 2002). The interview schedules for the three broad categories of participants are included in Appendix E I -3 .
All the interviews were audio taped, except one from New Zealand, which was at the specific request of the interviewee. However, notes written by the researcher were later shared with and endorsed by this participant.
The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and one hour on average, with three interviews l asting about one and a half hours. They were scheduled at times and places most convenient to the interviewees. In the majority of cases, this resulted in interviews being conducted in offices, either at the interviewee's desk or in meeting rooms within the institutions. Few interviews have taken place in institutional canteens or coffee shops, as suggested by some interviewees. These venues have proved to not be the most propitious places for interviews. The distractions from the
cacophony o f surrounding voices made the recording quality poor and resulted in difficulties with the transcription work.
At MCHE, the researcher was assigned a separate office (with access to computer and telephone) for the duration of the fieldwork. Some of the interviews were held in this room. Being a small community known to each other, one would assume that the scheduling of meetings and interviews would be an easy task. This proved not to be the case in the Maldives. A few interviews had to be re-scheduled more than once, since participants were extremely busy and were called away for urgent meetings or assignments. This multi functional nature of work is a feature in SDNs. Staff are called away to various activities on rather an ad-hoc basis, without prior notice or at very short notice. Hence, a few interviews were conducted after official working hours during weekdays13. Some interviews were also held during the weekends at the work site of the interviewees. One interview was held at the residence of the participant. Three out of the thirty Maldivian interviewees provided answers in writing. In addition, there was the opportunity to clarify or pursue additional issues with these three respondents, a situation of which I made use. Furthermore, answers to interview questions were obtained through emails from three participants associated with QA / higher education in the Maldives, since these people were out of the country on study leave during the data collection period. Additionally, I met six other senior officials for general discussion of issues related to the research. None of these discussions were considered formal interviews. Hence, the discussions were not audio recorded. In total 3 3 transcripts (including em ail responses) from the Maldives provided the main formal evidence base for the primary case study.
All interviews in New Zealand and at the USP were conducted in English. Although all interviewee participants in the Maldives could converse in English, nine out of 3 3 participants preferred to speak in their vernacular, the Dhivehi language. In addition, four participants chose to speak bilingually, freely shifting between English and Dhivehi throughout the interview. All the Dhivehi interviews were translated into English during transcription. I personally transcribed all the interviews conducted. The most difficult set of interviews, both for translation and transcription, were the
13 It is a common practice for institutions (and also the majority of government departments) to remain
open and work after 2.30 pm, which is the official finishing time for work. Official working hours in the government sector, under which the MCHE functions, were 7.30am to 2.30pm Sunday to Thursday: Friday and Saturday is the weekend.
Chapter Three: Methodology 92
bilingual ones. All transcripts were sent to the participants for verification and endorsement.
In the New Zealand case study, I achieved one hundred percent return of approval forms for the transcripts. In the case of USP, I received approval via email from all, except one participant. In the primary case study, I received endorsements of transcripts from 3 1 out of 33 respondents. This constituted an overall endorsement of 94 percent.
In the three HEls in this study, there was a general awareness of the respondents' identities among the participants. Preserving the anonymity of research participants in small institutions and small communities is a problematic issue. Hence, an anonymous referencing style was followed for all participants. (See Appendix B 1 ). However, due to the small number of staff involved in often quite specialised positions of work, it would not be very difficult to speculate about the identity of some respondents. This matter was acknowledged and mentioned in the research information sheet, which was initially provided with the introductory letter. Every effort was made to maintain the confidentiality of what was said during the interviews. No specific statement was used, which could be attributed to any one particular participant.
Thus, in three locations, a total of 54 interviews were conducted for this study. Through interviews, participants' "thoughts, values, prejudices, perceptions, views, feelings, and perspectives" were probed (Wellington, 2000, p.7 1 ). With a semi structured interview schedule, the interviews in this research have been regarded as a "conversation with a purpose" (Dexter, as cited in Merriam, 1 998, p. 7 1 ). It follows then, that the interviews in this study were not conducted to establish an inherent 'truth' . Instead, the interviewer recognises that there are 'multiple perceptions of realities' in social situations. A more primary aim was "seeking out the emic meanings held by the people within the case[s]" (Stake, 2000, p. 441 ) . This is consistent with the epistemology of social constructivism and the interpretive qualitative research paradigm adopted in this study (Crotty, 1 998; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005 ; Odendahl & Shaw, 2002; Stake, 2000).
The interview guides were not pilot tested in the traditional sense of using them in interviews with a selected group of informants, who were not included in the study sample. However, the set of questions were sent by email to two people associated with MCHE and another person, who was an overseas consultant to MCHE. They
Chapter Three: Methodology 93 were requested to comment on the clarity and appropriateness of questions posed. Two of the people contacted responded and the suggestions received, though minor, were incorporated into the interview guide. The set of questions sent to each participant, prior to the interview, contained core questions and specific questions. Thus each respondent was encouraged to discuss broad questions and also the specific aspects of the QA policy. The semi-structured interviewing approach allowed for the answers to be constructed by the respondents. Probes were used, based on the responses and issues and on the respondents' initiatives.
(ii) Questionnaire. A structured questionnaire (Appendix F) with four open ended questions was designed to be administered to all teaching staff within MeRE, who resided in Male' . At the time of data collection, this constituted 90 percent of the
MeRE teaching staff. The remaining 1 0 percent resided in five campuses distributed in the atolls of the country. No attempt was made to reach this 1 0 percent and therefore the 90 percent was deemed to constitute a fair representation of views from amongst the teaching staff of the institution. Furthermore, the logistics and time available for fieldwork did not appear to be viable for reaching this 1 0 percent. This questionnaire, taking approximately 30 minutes to complete, was intended to obtain qualitative data from teaching staff, in order to gauge their perceptions about academic quality and QA and ways of improving quality. It was thought important to obtain views from the teaching staff, since they constitute people who actually implement policies that impact on academic quality.
Before administering the questionnaire, it was sent to four purposefully selected academic staff members of MeRE to obtain feedback. Two of them were experienced academic staff members, who have been in higher education for more than ten years, beginning even prior to the merger. The other two had recently joined the institution and they had been in the system for less than three years. The questionnaire was sent by email to these staff members after they were contacted by telephone. They were requested to: ( 1) identify questions that may pose any difficulty with comprehension and to comment upon the overall appropriateness of the questions asked, (2) to give specific feedback as to the clarity of questions asked, and (3) give feedback regarding layout and presentation. All four members responded with feedback, although one responded after the given three-day time frame. All these academic staff members indicated that the questions / statements were clear and appropriate. No changes were suggested to the format of the questionnaire. One member suggested a slight alteration
Chapter Three: Methodology 94 of wording for two statements. This amendment was made before the questionnaire was printed for distribution.
3. 7.2.2 Documents
Documents are considered to be a valuable (Creswell, 2005) and ready-made (Merriam, 1 998) source of information in qualitative research. Documents consist of both public and private records obtained about a site or participants or a phenomenon under investigation. These can include a wide range of written, visual and physical material relevant to the study (Creswell, 2005; Merriam, 1 998).
For this research, the majority of documents collected were those in the public domain in the research sites. Additionally, unpublished documents in the form of minutes of College Council meetings, Academic Board meetings and reports submitted by consultants were made available to the researcher by request to the MCRE. Some documents, which were in limited circulation at the USP, were also made available to the researcher during the field visit to USP. In case study research, documents are believed to be valuable in corroborating and augmenting evidence from other sources (Yin, 1 989). In addition to obtaining a general background to the institutions, their overall aims, programmes and profiles, the following three specific questions were used to interrogate the documents collected:
(i) What is government / institutional policy for QA in higher education? (ii) Row are the institutions (MCRE, ABC College, and USP) implementing
their QA policies?
(iii)What challenges do the institutions face in achieving quality through their QA policies?
3. 7.2. 3 Participant observation
Participant observation was the fourth method of inquiry and was employed only at the primary case study site. According to Creswell (2005), observation is "a process of gathering open-ended, first-hand information by observing people and places at a research site" (p. 2 1 1 ) . Within the context of MCRE, participant observation could be described as having taken place in two separate phases. The first phase was the period of fulltime employment of the researcher in the institution prior, to the intensive two month fieldwork (that is prior to taking up this research). During this period, insights were gained from working with an external consultant on the QA component of a larger institutional development project and from the researcher's total immersion in the life of the College. This assisted with the initial identification of the research problem and the subsequent framing of the research questions. The observations from
Chapter Three: Methodology 95 this first phase were neither structured nor formally written down. Admittedly, the observations were also neither explicitly covert nor overt. Louisy ( 1 997), in her research based in her own tertiary institution, finds the type of observation that emerges from the total immersion in the management of the institution, to be helpful to "confirm or contradict issues which arose either in the literature or within the College itself' (p. 93). My experience in this study confirms her report.
The second phase of observation took place during the two-month intensive period of actual fieldwork planned for formal data collection. This was the period when all the interviews at the primary study site were undertaken. Observation was limited and took the form of attendance at planned meetings at MCHE. According to Vulliamy (1 990), educational case studies incorporating, what Walker (as cited in Vulliamy, 1 990), calls, "condensed fieldwork", has been conducted and it includes limited observation that departs from the classic and "comprehensive scale of participant observer [mould] favoured by conventional ethnographers" (Vulliamy, 1 990, p. 1 4). I attended meetings of the College Council, the Academic Board and the Dean's Committee. Data that arose from such observations was intended to supplement, challenge or substantiate data which had emerged from the interviews, documents and returning questionnaires. This could be seen as another effort at strengthening the validity and reliability of the present study.
3.8 Phase Three: Post-fieldwork
The last phase of the study involved the data analysis stage. In practice, this phase overlapped with the phase two activities of data gathering. Being a qualitative study based largely on interviews, data analysis actually began quite early, at the same period as the interviews. The next section elaborates on data analysis and interpretation.