Hipòtesis
3.1. Una aproximació La fenomenologia
4.3.1 Access, rapport and relationships
Access to policy documents for the macro-level data was not at all difficult, with these documents publicly available and having been analysed and scrutinised by academics already. However, access to interview participants at national level was far more difficult. The policy and third sector contacts were gained either through contacts within the case studies or through persistent emailing of Whitehall departments, being referred to various different people and eventually managing to arrange interviews. It was also intended that there would be additional interviews with an energy company representative and a national level installer or contractor, but after repeated emails with representatives from two energy companies (Eon and Npower) no interview materialised due to both clashing schedules and a plain lack of response.
For various reasons, accessing documents, meetings for observations and interview participants varied in difficulty between cases and between groups. An excerpt from my reflexive fieldwork journal details a slightly exasperating process of trying to establish contact with a Bristol-based installer, but being refused once the person I had made initial contact with realised that I was not going to be advertising the company or promoting its work. This process was repeated until unfortunately I was not able to gain an installer’s perspective in this context. However, employees at Bristol City Council, CSE and members of Bristol Energy Network were extremely welcoming and willing to discuss the Big Home Energy Upgrade and provide me with project reports and evaluations that they were working on in lieu of opportunities to observe at meetings.
In the Manchester context, everyone at Carbon Co-op welcomed me with open arms, viewing my presence as inherently positive and being interested in my opinion and input right from the start. However, in the Energy Saving Co-operative the relationship between me and the organisation was explicitly conditional – they allowed me to research them on the agreement that I gave something back such as producing meeting minutes and writing a
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guest blog post. In terms of board members of the ESC, many of them were only willing to participate in an interview once they had already met me at meetings where I was
observing and was able to explain the research to them and build a relationship with them. For example, one installer member told me:
“It’s a good job I’d met you, we get so many requests for research that I would probably have ignored your email if I didn’t know who you were”
Furthermore, the range of participants and key informants in each case was different, so for example, because the Carbon Co-op was a householder co-op, I gained valuable
householder perspectives, whereas for the BHEU which was local authority led, I gained perspectives of different parts of the local authority as well as from their partner
organisation, CSE, but far fewer community perspectives and no installer perspectives. From the Energy Saving Co-op, because some of the board members were installers, I was able to gain this perspective, but was not able to gain a householder perspective other than
secondary data from the Northfield Ecocentre website.
This does not mean that the data from any case is more or less valid than the other, but is important to bear in mind when taking in the case studies as they are presented differently according to the data that was available.
4.3.2 Triangulation, validity and reliability in practice
The idea of triangulation mooted above is to get multiple sources of data to corroborate the same theme or category, but in reality this was very difficult to achieve and data sources varied wildly between cases. Some information such as targets and funding that I obtained from interviews in Bristol, I got from documents in Manchester or observations in
Birmingham. In reality it was very difficult to get the same information from multiple sources, so instead I had to make judgements about what things to include and exclude as important parts of the cases.
The potential implications of this for the validity and reliability of the data are significant. My approach to this was to try to keep analysis and themes as close as possible to the data so that it accurately reflected the accounts given, and to take care in reporting so that if a theme was not shared by other sources it was either carefully illustrated as an individual perspective not a shared perspective or was not reported as a significant theme at all. Also,
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themes and concepts were modified as the fieldwork went along, so that important issues such as ECO troubles or different forms of knowledge (survey data) were included in the list of topics later in the fieldwork process, reflecting the emerging issues rather than just the predefined ones from the literature review.
4.4 Summary
This methodology chapter has outlined, explained and justified the empirical approach and research design that has been used, as well as reflecting on some elements of the process and what these meant for the reporting of data in the empirical chapters to come. It has explored the benefits of the comparative case study approach and thematic analysis, as well as explaining the process of conceptual refinement and negotiation.
The methodology employed - particularly its focus on networks and multiple perspectives and factors - incorporated actors, concepts and issues operating at multiple scales, from individual people, to local and national organisations, along with national and international policy. Its focus on city-based actors also incorporated the context sensitivity required for examining the specifically urban elements of the issue. Despite the challenges of negotiating access, and inconsistencies in the data from different contexts, this methodology did
successfully allow the theoretical framework to be operationalized in a way that met the requirements set out at the beginning of chapter 3. It produced rich data that represented a holistic approach to the problem of domestic retrofit, covering the specific social and
technical issues with that problem, the personal experiences of the people and
organisations involved, the broader ‘landscape’ issues around domestic retrofit, and the messiness of the place-specific, contingent elements of each of the urban responses to domestic retrofit under question.
The following chapters are the product of this methodology, marking the beginning of the empirical part of the thesis.
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