Research Practice

Your assessment comprises 2 main parts, as explained below. Part 1, comprising 40% of your whole mark, is focused on qualitative methodologies. Part 2, comprising 30% of your whole mark, is about quantitative methodologies.  You are required to answer both sections.

 

Part 1: Transcript coding

Gender diversity in organisational leadership has been understood to benefit organisations from various perspectives. Yet, several studies have demonstrated that despite significant shifts towards greater acceptance of women in leadership roles over the last couple of decades, women are still underrepresented in organisational leadership everywhere in the world however to varying degrees. The following TED talk transcript is focused on this issue. It is an abridged version of the talk that was held by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, in 2010. More than a decade later, the points that she raises in her talk are still relevant. The transcript and the full talk are accessible in the following link (retrieved on 19.01.2022):

https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders

Assume the following Research Question and sub-questions for this talk:

RQ: How can organisations address the problem of women’s underrepresentation in leadership positions?

Sub-Q1: What are the challenges that women face in their career path towards leadership?

Sub-Q2: What are the possible solutions to overcome women’s underrepresentation in organisational leadership positions?

 

Your Task is to:

• Code the transcript (Please note: You must mark the codes in the transcript, using different colours, AND you must provide a list of your codes, specifying their corresponding colour in the transcript).
• Develop a coding framework with themes and sub-themes (Please note: You must provide a clear definition for each theme and sub-theme).
• Illustrate your themes and sub-themes using direct quotations from the transcript.
• You should provide at least 10 codes, 2 themes and 3 sub-themes for each theme. You must provide at least 3 illustrations for each sub-theme. Illustrations must be in the same colours as their corresponding codes which are marked in the text.

 

In conducting your analysis, you should always consider the research questions. That is, the codes, the themes, and the sub-themes that you create should be in relation to the Research Questions and help potentially address them.

 

 

 

The transcript:

So for any of us in this room today, let’s start out by admitting we’re lucky… most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don’t have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it’s a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.

We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfilment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children….So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that’s the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and   talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that’s all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?

Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don’t have the right answer. I don’t even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who’s three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, “Mommy, don’t get on the plane” thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they’re at home or whether they’re in the workforce, who don’t feel that sometimes. So I’m not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.

My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don’t leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, “Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,” and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don’t you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.

The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I’m that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, “How did you do?” And Carrie says, “Boy, I feel like I didn’t really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic.” And I say, “God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke’s theory of property with the philosophers that follow.” And my brother says, “I got the top grade in the class.”

(Laughter)

“You got the top grade in the class? You don’t know anything.”

(Laughter)

The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they’ll say, “I’m awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?” If you ask women why they did a good job, what they’ll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don’t think they deserve their success, or they don’t even understand their own success.

I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, “Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.” I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone’s nodding, because we all know this to be true.

There’s a really good study that shows this really well. There’s a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she’s an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: “Heidi” to “Howard.” But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that’s good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He’s a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She’s a little out for herself. She’s a little political. You’re not sure you’d want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.

The saddest thing about all of this is that it’s really hard to remember this. And I’m about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, “I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up.” “What do you mean?” She said, “You’re giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men.” And I thought to myself, “Wow, if it’s me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can’t even notice that the men’s hands are still raised, and the women’s hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?” We’ve got to get women to sit at the table.

(Cheers)

(Applause)

Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I’ve become convinced that we’ve made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she’s got three jobs or two jobs, and he’s got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don’t have time to go into them. And I don’t think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.

I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it’s hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don’t play with him. And that’s a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it’s the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we’re going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.

(Applause)

Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn’t good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more — how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.

(Cheers)

Message number three: Don’t leave before you leave. I think there’s a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here’s what happens: We’re all busy. Everyone’s busy. A woman’s busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. “How am I going to fit this into everything else I’m doing?” And literally from that moment, she doesn’t raise her hand anymore, she doesn’t look for a promotion, she doesn’t take on the new project, she doesn’t say, “Me. I want to do that.” She starts leaning back….

But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who’s been through this — and I’m here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it’s hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you’re making a difference. And if two years ago you didn’t take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you’re going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don’t leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. Don’t make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you’re not even conscious you’re making…

Thank you.

(Applause)

 

Part 2: Quantitative data collection

In a research project, you have been asked to examine the impact of managers’ demographic characteristics on their choice of initiating compulsory redundancy during the pandemic. You will read the literature to see if there is any theory explaining the relationship between managerial characteristics and firm strategic decisions. You find Upper Echelon Theory by Hambrick and Mason (1984). You find the following graph in Hambrick and Mason (1984) and you think this conceptual framework can help you when collecting the data.

 

 

You decide you want to collect primary data using a questionnaire. To be able to conduct this research, what questions do you include in your questionnaire?

 

You need to consider the following points when designing your questionnaire:

1. The questionnaire must contain only 4 questions. A high-quality questionnaire contains questions that are directly related to the topic under investigation (you receive no mark for less relevant questions). Each question can contain one or several related sub-questions or statements (maximum of 4 sub-questions or statement) to construct a measure.
2. A high-quality questionnaire consists of questions that leads to quantifiable measures; therefore, using open-ended questions is not advised.
3. You need to choose between binary, ordinal, categorical and numeric variables. An excellent questionnaire frames the questions in a way to have the most appropriate variable type as output. For example, one student might ask about the intensity of employee downsizing using a question that employs Likert rating, another student might ask a yes or no question to examine whether the firm had announced employee downsizing. While the two questions are related to downsizing, the first one is preferred as it provides more information about downsizing.
4. The questions in a high-quality questionnaire are all relevant, have the right wording (i.e., the question is stated so clearly that all the respondents interpret the question the same way) and come in the right order.

 

References:

Hambrick, D.C. and Mason, P.A., 1984. Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of management review, 9(2), pp.193-206.

 

Research Practice Individual Assessment: A guideline

 

Introduction

 

Provide a brief background summary of your research in the introduction: what is your research about? What is your objective of doing the interview? What are your research questions? What is your target group (who are those that you would interview for this research)?

Assume the following RQ and sub-questions:

What are the elements that should be included in the Individual Assessment of the Research Practice course by the students?

• How are the four main marking criteria for this assessment detailed by the course coordinator?
• How could the Assessment’s layout look like?

The rest of this document is organised as follows: first, an abridged verbatim transcript of an imaginary interview is produced. To this end, it is assumed that a student has conducted this interview with the Course Coordinator. Second, the interview transcript is coded, using various colours. The coding strategy is developed to facilitate addressing the research questions. The coded transcript is followed by the table of the codes and their corresponding colours. Finally, a table is provided, in which various themes and sub-themes together with relevant illustrations from the interview transcript are shown. Similarly, the themes and sub-themes are produced to analyse the data in order to address the research question mentioned above.

 

 

Interview transcript

Provide some demographic information of your interviewee.

Provide some information about the place of the interview.

Provide some information about the length of the interview (how long did it take?)

 

I: interviewer

R: Respondent (Interviewee)

 

I: What do you think I should write here?

R: After a brief introduction to your research, start with providing your verbatim interview transcript here. Make sure you check the Assessment Criteria for the transcripts and meet all the necessary parameters.

I: If my interviewee says things, such as hmmm when answering a question, or laughs should I include that in my transcript?

R: yes.

I: Why? Why do you think including such things is important?

R: hmmm… well, let me put it this way: it is certainly important for your mark, as it is demonstrative of a verbatim transcript. Again, I refer you to the Assessment Criteria for this.

I: how can I include the information about laughing at all?

R:you can use brackets to show that. For example: text [laughs] text. If you check the example provided on the Teaching Week 2, Tuesday 28^th April, you see a similar approach being demonstrated there. Also, in the Thematic analysis exercise, you are provided with an interview transcript example.This interview transcript is also a verbatim transcript provided to you for your further reference.

I: what is a good interview transcript? 

R:Your transcript should be demonstrative of a good quality interview and should provide a rich data set. It should help you address your research questions as you mentioned above.An interview transcript with many very short answers of the interviewee is less likely to provide a rich data set that is helpful for addressing your research question.

I: how can I code?

R: It has been taught to you in detail during the Teaching Week 2.You can also check the lecture slide on ‘Thematic analysis’ in the folder: Tuesday, 28^th April to see examples of coding.I have also coded this imaginary interview for your further reference.

I: how can I work out my themes and sub-themes?

R: This has been taught to you in detail during the Teaching Week 2 too.You can also check the lecture slide on ‘Thematic analysis’ to see an example of how you can demonstrate your themes and sub-themes and the illustrations for your sub-themes in a table. Additionally, I have made some themes and sub-themes out of my codes for this interview, for your further reference.

I: how many illustrations should I have for each sub-theme?

R:You should provide a minimum one illustration. There is no maximum for that. Obviously, the better you interview, and the better you code, the more illustrations you will have for your sub-themes.

I: is there a word limit for this Assessment?

R: No. As per above, the better you interview, and the better you code, the more illustrations you will have for your sub-themes. Consequently, the longer will be your Assessment in terms of word count.

I: should I present my codes too? Or themes and sub-themes would be enough?

R:you need to demonstrate your codes too. So, the labels you give to each bit and piece of the text (your codes) should be provided. Additionally, you need to provide a definition for each theme and sub-theme, as taught to you in the ‘Thematic analysis’ lecture.You can review this by referring to the lecture slides. I have also done this for you with this imaginary example for your further reference.

 

The following table demonstrates the codes that are produced from the above interview transcript:

 

 

Colours	Codes
	Verbatim transcript
	Transcript Assessment Criteria
	Important for marks
	Already available transcript examples
	Further help with verbatim transcript
	Good transcript
	Interview
	Rich data
	Weak data
	Not helpful data
	In-class taught coding
	Already available coding examples
	Further help with coding
	In-class taught theme
	Already available theme examples
	Further help with themes
	Number of illustrations
	In-class taught theme
	Code production
	Illustrations

 

 

Themes and sub-themes (since this is only a guide and not a ‘real’ assessment paper, for each sub-theme only some of the illustrations are provided as examples):

 

Themes	Sub-themes	Illustrations
Transcript This theme describes various elements that are involved in making an interview transcript for the Individual Assessment of QB5503	Verbatim This sub-theme describes any element that should be considered in producing and presenting a verbatim transcript	‘start with providing your verbatim interview transcript’   ‘check the Assessment Criteria for the transcripts and fulfil all the necessary parameters’   ‘it iscertainly important for your mark’
	Data richness This sub-theme describes issues regarding the quality of a transcript	‘transcript should be demonstrative of a good quality interview’   ‘It should help you address your research questions’   ‘An interview transcript with many very short answers of the interviewee is less likely to provide a rich data set that is helpful for addressing your research question.   ‘transcript with many very short answers of the interviewee is less … helpful for addressing your research question’
	Transcript learning materials This sub-theme describes the reference to all the transcript-related material that have been already provided as well as those provided through this guide	‘check the example provided on Delivery Week, Day 2, you see a similar approach being demonstrated there. Also, in Day 4 folder, Thematic analysis exercise, you are provided with an interview transcript example’   ‘This interview transcript is also a verbatim transcript provided to you for your further reference’
Coding Framework This theme describes the different issues that students of QB5503 should consider for producing their coding framework in the Individual Assessment	Codes production This sub-theme explains the required tasks involved in demonstrating the codes in the assessment	‘you need to demonstrate your codes too. So, the labels you give to each bit and piece of the text (your codes) should be provided.’
	Coding learning materials This sub-theme describes the reference to all the coding-related material that have been already provided as well as those provided through this guide	‘how can I code? R: It has been taught to you in detail during the Delivery Week’   I have also coded this imaginary interview for your further reference.   You can also check the lecture slide on ‘Thematic analysis’ in the folder: Delivery Week, Day 4 to see examples of coding.
Themes and sub-themes This theme describes the parameters of producing themes and sub-themes with their corresponding evidence in data	Illustrations This sub-theme refers to all explanations about the corresponding quotations for each sub-theme	‘As I mentioned to you before, you should provide a minimum one illustration. There is no maximum for that. Obviously, the better you interview, and the better you code, the more illustrations you will have for your sub-themes’     the better you interview, and the better you code, the more illustrations you will have for your sub-themes. Consequently, the longer will be your Assessment in terms of word count.
	Themes learning materials This sub-theme describes the reference to all the theme and sub-theme-related material that have been already provided as well as those provided through this guide	‘I have made some themes and sub-themes out of my codes for this interview, for your further reference’.   ‘you need to provide a definition for each theme and sub-theme, as taught to you in the ‘Thematic analysis’ lecture’   ‘work out my themes and sub-themes? R: again, this has been taught to you in detail during the Delivery Week’