Study Methodology & Current Status

Study Methodology

All data are being collected in accordance with Ethical guidelines from the American Psychological Association.

The data from the five different countries undergo a stepwise procedure:

1. Interview collection & transcription
2. Summary of the individual interview (interview summary)
3. Integration of the summaries of the individual interviews by country (country summary)
4. Thematic excerpting of the most relevant passages in each interview (excerpting)
5. Interview analysis with qualitative research software (analysis)

1. Interview and transcription

Interviews are approximately 1 hour in duration, either face-to-face or by phone. Broadly, the interview topics are:

• Definition of career success
• Work-life balance
• Facilitators and obstacles for career progress
• Choices and trade-offs during one's career
• Expectations for women and men leaders
• Organizational factors and the role of relationships

Interviews are audio-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts are then double-checked for accuracy.

2. & 3. Interview Summaries and Country Summaries

Interview transcripts are summarized according to the content relating to the topics mentioned above. Summarizing is done in two steps. First we summarize the individual interview according to its content. Second we summarize the different individual summaries on a culture level. This country summary includes the same themes as the individual summaries, but gives an overview of emerging communalities or differences among interviewees in each country. The step of summarizing is important to get a first insight what could be the main differences between the countries and develop an initial coding system for analyzing the data. In order to ensure that summaries are accurate and capture all relevant information in the interview, each interview is summarized by two CCL researchers, who integrate their individual summaries.

4. Thematic excerpting

The analysis of all interview data is organized thematically rather than by country. Thus, the first step of analysis is the excerpting of relevant text passages from all interviews for the various themes that the interview has covered. This step is supported by scientific software.

5. Interview analysis

In the interview analysis, we examine how the content and context of each theme shows communalities and variation between individual participants as well as the different countries. Based on the data and our scientific background knowledge, we develop coding schemes for each theme. This process ensures the integration of theory-based analyzing and data-based analyzing at the same time. This integration helps ensure that data can be 'made sense of' quickly, while opening up the opportunity to reveal new information. For the country level, the analyses of the different individual interviews are compared and contrasted. Further modes of analysis look at the impact of gender and organizational level on people's answers in the interviews.

The Status quo: Where we are in the process

Data collection is finished for all five countries and we are in the middle of analyzing these data. The chart below summarizes the status quo of our study.