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objectives may be achieved by the following considerations, all of which may need to be tested and further confirmed in the literature review of New Urbanism, relative case studies, and evaluation through questionnaire.

2.2.1 Potential application of literature review

According to the analysis of the research question in 1.1.2 and the methodology of the literature review discussed in 2.1.1, the review undertaken for this study is primarily related to New Urbanism. The author achieves this by searching all sources of New Urbanism, categorising by clarification like theories, practice, structuring, and writing, to obtain the previous research and the gap that this study aims to bridge. These steps offer fundamental theoretical support to answer the research question – Can the design principles of new urbanism promote local identity or harmony with local context for urban/village extension?

2.2.2 Potential application of case studies a) Initial selection of case studies

The first decision in a case study is whether a single case or multiple cases will be investigated. The evidence from multiple cases is often considered more compelling than from a single case, and the overall study is therefore regarded as being more robust (Herriott and Firestone, 1983). According to Herriott and Firestone (1983), one case appears not to be representative of other instances; however more than one case may allow the researcher to generalise the outcomes. Given that the conduct of more than two case studies may require extensive resources and time beyond the means of a single student or independent research investigator (Yin, 2014, p.57), this

research selects two cases through a rigourous selection process, while tries to avoid case selection bias.

The next step is the identification of the cases to investigate. The researcher needs to define the case list which conforms to the research needs. For instance, it first needs to be a new urbanist community. On completion of the list, two appropriate cases are selected based on the research question. To start with, the cases of this study should be an urban/village extension by echoing the research subject of urban/village extensions as discussed in 1.1.2. The other factor is that it is better to consider physically available fieldworks, which means the appropriate cases should be completed or closely completed.

b) Case studies

Based on the discussion in section 2.1.2, four approaches are necessary for case studies: documentation, direct observation, interviews, and visual mapping.

First, in this research, a good documentation collection has done in terms of the guidance of this methodology, such as from published books and journal papers, minutes of meetings, master plans sent by Digimap, articles from newspaper and online newspaper in the media, administrative documents.

Such a range of documentation is important in understanding the construct of a case study, and to retain focus on the targets to be achieved.

Second, this research requires field visits to the cases by using less formal ways of direct observation, such as observing neighbourhoods for understanding circumstances and local context being studied, experiencing the sense of place, taking photos, talking to local people, and so on.

Therefore, the evidence that has been obtained via direct observation is very valuable to provide strong support for this research.

Third, the interviewees in this research, they include professionals involved in the selected two cases, from the perspective of land owner, engineer consultant, new urbanism pioneer like the Prince’s Foundation, lead architect,

Council, or BREEAM Communities. Some candidates are identified through relevant documentation, and others are recommended by the earliest participants. Thematising is paramount for interviews. If the purpose and the concept are identified, the questions can be designed according to the needs of the research. This study adopts a semi-structured question list with open-ended questions. Semi-structured here means there are some fixed questions asked from the first interviewee to the last one. For example, a question is fixed based on the theoretical framework established in chapter 3.

The question lists for the interviewees are slightly different because the professionals represent different perspectives; however, the main aim of the discussion is to answer the research question of this study. Of importance too, a few different questions are included that are individually guided by ongoing conversations. This requires having an overview of all interviewees and an interview study, paying attention to the interdependence of the stages and also pushing forward tasks at later stages (Kvale, 2007, p.41).

Additionally, interviews need a quiet place to be conducted. For PhDs, if possible, it is better book a room in advance which not only partly eases tension but is also beneficial for recording interviews. Moreover, audiotape recording, phone recording, videotape recording, note-taking and remembering may be used in interviews. However, for instance, videotape recording is not necessary for a telephone interview, which is becoming a common way of conducting interviews. The interviewers can devote themselves to the theme and dynamics of the interview. All the digital data can be easily transferred to a laptop or computer and stored permanently, to be later written up and analysed by re-listening. Furthermore, coding and categorising play important roles for the analysis of texts in the social sciences. Coding involves attaching one or more keywords to a text segment in order to permit later identification of a statement, whereas categorisation entails a more systematic conceptualisation of a statement, thereby opening it up for quantification; the two terms are, however, often used interchangeably (Kvale, 2007, p.105). The analysis should illustrate one way of unified coding or categorisation. In addition, key respondents can be asked

about the facts of a matter as well as their opinions about events (Yin, 2009, p.107). However, the outcomes of interviews should be objective rather than subjective, showing reliability and validity which respectively pertains to the consistency and trustworthiness, the truth, the correctness and the strength of a statement (Kvale, 2007, p.122). Finally, the readability of interview quotes should be enhanced as much as possible in order to be understood by readers.

Fourth, there are two aspects of visual mapping. One is photographing, such as buildings, landscape, public places, unique decorations and arts, and so on. The other is the analysis of documentation drawings formatting as PDF, JPG, and DWG which are originally collected from Digimap, journal papers, books, interviewees, and others. By using relevant tools such as Photoshop or AutoCad, the photographs have been edited to fit the research needs, and the drawings have been analysed to show reliable data like phasing, urban form, the road network, walking analysis, and others. They help understand the inferences and qualities of texts. In summary, visual research and imagery analysis is a fundamental methodology applied in this research.

2.2.3 Potential application of questionnaire

This research employs face-to-face administered on-the-spot questionnaire that is used to collect factual information to further verify the outcomes established by case studies and answer the research question academically.

This method can provide the possibility to explain and answer any questions of participants, which tries to avoid misinterpretation and low rate of returns, as discussed in 2.1.3. Moreover, the targeted population of the questionnaire is the residents living in where the cases are, because the residents may be more knowledged about new urbanist communities, which in turn strengthens the factual information of the questionnaires being reliable and valid.

Additionally, participants may answer the questions unintelligibly if the questionnaire takes too long time (Brace, 2013). So the questionnaire of this research is better to have no more than two pages and take five minutes approximately.

The questionnaire is designed by including three sections. The demographic information, age and gender is Section 1 in that this study plans to employ stratified probability sampling. As reviewed in 2.1.3, this can help create broad bands as strata while in the meantime providing an equal chance for everybody to be selected. Section 1 is not cross-tabulated to compare how opinions vary between these groups. Section 2 includes three questions. This section has a primary aim if the results are positive. It helps to further support that the two cases are representative. Finally, the respondents need to rate the importance for the design principles of new urbanism in Section 3. This section tries to further verify that the design principles are important to promote local identity or harmony with local context for creating an urban/village extension.

Furthermore, the questionnaire of this research requires a pilot study for a day on the spot to check people’s understanding and ability to answer the questions, average time spent per questionnaire, hot spots accessible to people, and how many questionnaires can be administered and completed in a day. If the location of the case is not easily accessible, some questionnaires can be posted or sent by email to local residents’ committee members by way of a pilot study. The contact of local committee member can be obtained through the relevant website or other possible sources. Based on the pilot study, the researcher is able to have clearer questionnaires, know where the best locations to do questionnaires are, and plan time and costs for the trips to distribute the questionnaires.

Finally, this research plans to use computer coding by transferring the responses from the paper questionnaire into an Excel spreadsheet. The researcher put each question number as a column heading, and use a row for each participant’s answers. On conclusion of this procedure, the accuracy of the data must be checked. Then it is possible to calculate how many people there are for each option by employing a filter to each question via Excel. Additionally, graphs like pie charts are created at this stage to display the statistics. Once these diagrams are generated, the stories they tell and

the meanings they convey can be discussed, based on the research question.

If necessary, the figures may be compared to better answer the main research question.