Caitlin is studying for a Master’s degree in Organisational Psychology at her local Business School. Her project tutor is conducting research about diversity and organisational change with a major international oil company (OilCo.) and has asked Caitlin whether she would like to use the company as the focus of her research project. There is the opportunity to do an additional but discrete piece of research about diversity in the company. Specifically, the company would like to run focus groups with some female staff at their large London headquarters site. A focus group is like an interview but it takes place in a group format with a number of people participating. It is a well-used method within market research and also popular with management researchers because a variety of views on the same topic can be accessed at the same time. Oilco are aware that minority groups within the organisation feel somewhat excluded from career development opportunities and their new Head of Diversity and Inclusion is interested in finding out why this may be the case. 

Caitlin’s project tutor has suggested that she can set up and run the focus groups and use the data gathered for her Master’s research project. Her project tutor will offer advice on the design of the focus groups and how to analyse the data.

Caitlin is very enthused by this prospect. When her project tutor first mentioned it to her she wrote in her research diary that evening ‘I am so excited about this. It was my favourite topic during the course, it is really hard to get people to take part in diversity research and here it seems to all be in place. Plus I will actually get the chance to make some real change in an actual organisation. I just hope I can make the most of it.’

At the first meeting between the Head of Diversity for OilCo and Caitlin, the Head of Diversity set out her expectations of the work. The company will take responsibility for inviting people to be part of the focus groups and will organise the sessions at their headquarters. This will include making sure that staff have time off work to attend and sort out refreshments. Caitlin and her project tutor will be responsible for designing the content of the focus groups and Caitlin for running the sessions. Caitlin and her project tutor will retain exclusive publishing rights to the data, as long as the name of the company is kept confidential in all potential outputs, including Caitlin’s project.

Once back at the University, Caitlin and her project tutor discuss how she will run the focus groups and what the interesting theoretical issues are that they would like to address. They are both interested in intersectionality theory and hope to capture some of that through the data analysis. Intersectionality theory suggests that there are a number of different characteristics upon which individuals can be discriminated against, for example race, gender and sexuality. Hence rather than focus upon one characteristic, intersectionality researchers focus upon the impact of the intersections between the different characteristics (Crenshaw 1989). Caitlin and her tutor also talk about Caitlin ensuring that she has University ethical approval for the project research, as her project tutor warns her that this can sometimes take a few weeks to come through.

When Caitlin gets home she looks at her research methods textbooks. Following advice, she decides that in choosing the participants the ideal would be to have mixed groups of staff of different ages from different parts of the country and ideally have some Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women as part of the sample. This will enable her to look for any interesting intersectionalities in diversity experiences. She also decides that the optimal number of focus groups would be three, and that there should be about six people in each group. She plans to audio-record the focus groups and analyse the qualitative data using template analysis, a form of qualitative data analysis strategy that she wrote an assignment on in her research methodology course. She notes all this down to discuss with her project tutor the next time she sees her.

Over the next week Caitlin spends more time familiarising herself with the literature on intersectionality. A week after the meeting at OilCo, Caitlin receives an email from the Head of Diversity. In it she says ‘We are very much looking forward to the focus groups discussions. We have organised for five one-hour long focus groups to take place next Tuesday. There will be 15 people in each group. We have also organised for your findings to be presented to the Company HR Director at our regular catch-up meeting on the Monday after. I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.’

Caitlin is horrified by the email. She writes in her research diary, ‘How could this have happened? How am I going to do five groups in a day, it will be exhausting. How will I be able to analyse all that qualitative data analysis in a week? And I haven’t even filled in my ethics form yet. I might not have ethical clearance by then. What am I going to do? How can I explain to them that I can’t do it? I can’t see how I can do this but the worst thing would be to lose such a great opportunity. What is going to happen to my project now?’ Caitlin decides that she will see her project tutor as soon as she can to try and work out what to do next.

Questions

1. How does Caitlin’s experience illustrate the differences in approaches to research taken by academics and practitioners?

2. What, if anything, do you think Caitlin did wrong here? Give reasons for your answer.

3. What advice do you think Caitlin’s project tutor will offer her about what to do next?