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186 A Diverse Understanding of Value in the Building Industry
aspects of building are gathered in a product value paradigm. To fulfill the
client’s reasonable needs and requirements, cooperation among the
stakeholders in the building process is needed. The success of this
cooperation process is highly dependent on the personal values of the
participants and the common values of the project. The second paradigm
is, therefore, the process values paradigm.
1.4 THE SURVEY APPROACH
It was decided to apply a survey approach to obtain a larger set of data. A
survey was designed in order to investigate the hypothesis. The
advantages of using surveys as a data collection method are mainly a fast
and cost efficient way of collecting a rather large amount of data (de Vaus
1993).
The disadvantages are reported as, e.g. a possible low response rate
(Delgado-Hernandez and Aspinwall 2005), lack of opportunity to clarify
respondent doubts and no control over the speed with which participants
return the completed questionnaires (Burns and Bush 2001). This was,
however, taken into consideration when designing the questionnaire and
when planning the data collection. It is, however, an accepted and
widespread data collection method to such a kind of research in the
building industry (Barrett and Lee 2004).
1.4.1 Designing the Questionnaire
An online survey tool (PHPSurveyor 2005) that could distribute the
questionnaires by email and collect the data through a database solution
on a webpage was used. The first step in designing the questionnaire was
to choose which competes and variables that could support the
investigation of the research hypothesis. In other words, a breakdown
process from nominal variable to operational question was carried out. The
final part of the breakdown was the actual questions written in the survey.
Control over this structure was essential for making the analysis possible
and hence receive reliable output from the analysis.
A mixture of scales was utilized, i.e. nominal, ordinal, and interval
scales. Predominant was the ordinal scale due to the intensive use of the
Likert scale (Stevens 1946).
One part of the questionnaire was designed to give information about
the respondents’ basic data, i.e. demographic variables. This part asks
questions about the respondent’s company size and type. Furthermore, the
respondent should answer in which geographical area the company
operates and whether the company had participated in any kind of
development initiatives in the building industry. The second part of the
questionnaire covered questions about variables concerning the
respondent’s perception of the value concept. All questions were designed
as 5-point Likert scales. In total, the questionnaire contained 15 questions,
which makes it possible to complete the questionnaire within 10 minutes.
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