Understandability and Transparency of the Financial Statements of ...

clarifications. This approach was utilised, where possible in this research, by utilising
the financial statements of the Charities that the interviewee was talking about, to verify
their comments. However, this option was not always feasible as several interviewees,
mainly faith-based, advised the researcher that she would not be able to view the
financial statements due to privacy concerns.
In this research the last question asked was a broad question ascertaining whether
anything had been omitted in the interview with regards to complexities in the financial
statements of charities (Bedard & Gendron, 2004). Interviewees took the opportunity to
summarise their answers and often to disclose additional information, which at times
proved very fruitful as interviewees brought up some very interesting facts that added
depth to their information and the research data.
Near the end of the interview, to encourage snowballing, the interviewee was asked if
they knew anyone else who would be prepared to be contacted for an interview.
However, this, as mentioned previously, did not always meet with success, supporting
Ahrens‟ (2004) statement that finding interview participants is a combination of subtlety
and luck. Next, how the interviews were recorded is discussed.
4.5.3 Recording the interviews
The interview needs to be recorded in a variety of ways to aid validity, and several
methods were used in this research including; tapes, transcripts and interview notes
written either during or after the interview.
TAPE RECORDING
Twenty semi-structured interviews were recorded, as the interviewees had no objection
to being taped. Unfortunately, as Hayes and Mattimoe (2004) highlights, interviewees
in the charities sector are not used to a tape so are very reluctant for their interviews to
be taped. The researcher did find reluctance of this by some interviewees, even with an
emphasis on the positives of tape recording. If there was still unease it was safer to opt
for manual note recording of the interview or even just recording part of the interview
so that the interviewee felt more comfortable.
One advantage of a tape recorder was that it captured more detail than when relying on
memory (Hayes & Mattimoe, 2004; Moll et al., 2006; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).
However, it was important that participants were comfortable talking in the tape
recorder‟s presence. This was facilitated, to a certain extent, by having a small recorder
87