COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

RESEARCH PAPER
ANALYSIS

COURSE
METHODS IN BUSINESS RESEARCH

SUBMITTED BY
MUHAMMAD HAMZA

CLASS
BBA VI-II

DATE
FEBRUARY 19, 2007

ARTICLES
‘Life would be pretty dull without
risk’:
voluntary risk-taking and its
pleasures
Deborah Lupton & John Tulloch

‘I was like a wild wild person’:

Understanding feelings of anger
using interpretative
phenomenological analysis
Virginia Eatough* and Jonathan Smith
School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of
London, UK
‘Life would be pretty dull without risk’:
voluntary risk-taking and its pleasures
Deborah Lupton & John Tulloch

SAMPLING
Size
A total of 74 people were interviewed in this study during 1997–98:

Location
32 Sydney & Blue Mountains - Largest Australian city and neighboring rural area
respectively
28 Wollongong - large post-industrial city near Sydney
14 Bathurst - a small country town some 210 km west of Sydney

All these area are in state of New South Wales and were chosen to provide geographical
diversity.

Interviewees
First few interviewees were recruited and interviewed by research assistants living in the
locales, who used pre-existing social networks and snowball sampling for recruitment. The
group of interviewees was dominated by well-educated, young and middle-aged adults of
British ancestry

Participants

42 female
Gender
32 male.
44 with at least some university education
7 had trade or technical qualification
Of remainder;
Education
2 high school graduates
16 didn’t complete high school
2 were still school students
56 with British ancestry
Of the remainder,
Ethnicity 15 of continental European ethnicity
2 were of Lebanese ethnicity
1 was Aboriginal
Concentrated around early and middle
adulthood
8 were aged 20 or less
20 were aged between 21 and 30
Age
19 aged between 31 and 40
13 aged between 41 and 50
7 aged between 51 and 60
6 aged 61 or over (one unknown).

RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
In-depth Interviews

The reason why qualitative research was preferred over the quantitative
research, as mentioned in paper, was ‘to identify the role played by risk
epistemologies and experiences in people’s everyday lives. A qualitative
approach allows us to elicit to a greater depth the meanings imputed to risk
and risk-taking.’

The reason for choosing in-depth interviews as primary research technique, in

my opinion, is that no other technique can dig into the feelings and reasons
of the voluntary risk taking. Through interviews, they have been able to
gather comments which express the deep reasons for which voluntary risks
are pursued.

Each participant was interviewed individually using a semi-structured

interview schedule, except for two group discussions comprised of four
university students in Sydney and a similar group in Wollongong. The
questions asked of participants were directed at eliciting their views and
experiences of risk in relation to their personal biographies, so as to
contextualize risk in their everyday lives. They were asked to define risk, to
describe the risks they saw as threatening themselves personally, both in the
past and the present, and threatening Australians in general, how they had
learnt about risks and who or what they saw as the cause of risks. The
analytical emphasis was on key themes, narratives, definitions, discourses,
personal/social histories, rhetorical and expressive devices and so on,
emerging from the transcribed interviews. In particular, researchers wished to
identify the meanings that our interviewees gave to the concept of ‘risk’, the
ways in which they identified risks as affecting themselves and how they
sought to express these ideas using specific discursive strategies.

ANALYSIS
Researchers conducted interviews with the sample and recorded them and
then prepared its transcript. Researchers them analyzed the transcript and
looked for the generalizations in them and then grouped the common reasons
why people feel pleasure in voluntary risk taking.

SHORTCOMINGS
Though there are 3 non-white people in the sample, but there is a previous
research mentioned in this research paper that indicates that white men tend
to be more risk seeking than non-white people. Hence this research may be a
better generalization for white men only and not for any sample containing
‘I was like a wild wild person’:
Understanding feelings of anger using
interpretative phenomenological analysis
Virginia Eatough* and Jonathan Smith
School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, UK

SAMPLING

This research involves only one respondent making it an idiographic case

study.

Initially, Marilyn, the only respondent, was to be one of the participants in a

small-scale study looking at how women experience and resolve conflict in
their lives. However, the depth, richness and texture of Marilyn’s narrative led
to the decision to change the focus of the project and to carry out a detailed
idiographic case study.

RESEARCH TECHNIQUES

An interview schedule was developed and the first author carried out two
semi-structured interviews over a period of 3 weeks, which resulted in 4
hours of data. The interviews took place in Marilyn’s home and were recorded
onto a mini-disk recorder. Although there were specific issues researchers
hoped to address, the primary aim was for Marilyn to tell her story and not
simply be a respondent. The interview aimed to capture the richness and
complexity of Marilyn’s emotional experiences of anger. Thus, it progressed
down avenues Marilyn opened up rather than those dictated by the schedule.
The interview data were transcribed in full.

ANALYSIS

The procedure adopted in this study involved treating the interviews as one
set of data. The stages used throughout the analysis were as follows: the
transcript was read several times and the left-hand margin used to make
notes of anything that appeared significant and of interest. With each
reading, the researcher should expect to feel more ‘wrapped up’ in the data,
becoming more responsive to what is being said.

The second stage involved returning to the transcript afresh and using the
right-hand margin to transform initial notes and ideas into more specific
themes or phrases, which called upon psychological concepts and
abstractions. This process moved between inductive and deductive positions;
the participant’s account can bring to light issues unanticipated by the
researcher and their questions, and the researcher taking a theoretically
sensitive stance begins to think about how these issues can be
conceptualized.

The third stage consisted of further reducing the data by establishing

connections between the preliminary themes and clustering them
appropriately. These clusters were given a descriptive label (higher-order
theme title) which conveys the conceptual nature of the themes therein.

Finally, a table was produced that showed each higher-order theme and the
sub-themes which comprise it. A brief illustrative data extract is presented
alongside each theme. This table was the outcome of an iterative process in
which the researcher has moved back and forth between the various analytic
stages ensuring that the integrity of what the participant said has been
preserved as far as possible

A narrative account of the interplay between the interpretative activity of the

researcher and the participant’s account of the experience in their own words
was produced. Analysis continued into this formal process of writing up. The
researcher should aimed to provide a close textual reading of the
participant’s account, moving between description and different levels of
interpretation, at all times clearly differentiating between them. Enough data
had to be presented for the reader to assess the fit between the participant’s
accounts and the researcher’s understanding of them.

SHORTCOMINGS

A very apparent short coming of this study is the sample size. Though the
research is an astonishing dive into the way body feels with the emergence of
different emotions, but its use can be of very limited scope.