Page 18 - ACF Young Australians Research Report

4.2 Qualitative Research: Interview
The purpose of the interviews was to gain an in-depth understanding of the trends found in the quantitative survey. The qualitative interviews were conducted one-on-one instead of relying on a focus-group. This method was chosen as it eliminates group bias, so participants were less likely to be influenced by others’ opinions. This also allowed interviewers to engage in more considered discussions on topics that may be sensitive, for instance monetary giving or income level.
The project team created questions and facilitated ten interviews. The structure of the questions was based on questions from ACF’s previous ‘Workplace Giving in Australia Survey37’ for continuity. Having a similar structure of questions meant the collation of data was easily comparable to the findings from ACF’s previous research. The researchers who conducted the previous ACF report assisted with this task.
In-depth interviews involved 15-20 minutes of guided discussion about the participant’s attitude towards and awareness of Workplace Giving and charitable giving generally. Participants were sourced from the project team’s personal, professional and university networks as well as the employees of ACF’s partner organisations.
All interviews were recorded and ‘NVivo’, a qualitative research software program, was used to code
and store the texts (see Appendix 2 and Appendix 3). This approach is drawn from Strauss and Glaser’s ‘Grounded Theory’ (1967) where the research process itself guides the researcher to examine all of the avenues toward understanding. It was during the preliminary round of open coding that two types of discourses emerged. The first described different kinds of charity that people donate to and the second discussed the motivations behind donating. Both were deemed important and as such, the data was re- analysed and some additional research added to support the validity of the findings and to generate
axial and selective codes. At this stage, it was possible to create a word frequency cloud that provided a visual depiction of the main themes in the interviews (see Appendix 4). These qualitative findings were then compared with the quantitative results. The process of comparison revealed if there were convergent or divergent opinions on the same topic. Broad patterns and themes began to emerge in the data that formed the basis of the recommendations38.
37. ACF, “Workplace Giving in Australia” Survey Questions, see attached in Appendix.
38. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Aldine, 1967).
16 YOUNG AUSTRALIANS; MOTIVATIONS FOR WORKPLACE GIVING | 2016