Understandability and Transparency of the Financial Statements of ...

clearer picture of the interviewee‟s behaviour could be gleaned, as open-ended
questions were asked to further develop a particular aspect of the reason for their answer
(Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2005; Robson, 1993).
Patton (2002) highlights a possible weakness in this approach in that the standardised
wording of questions can constrain and limit the naturalness of the questions and
answers. However, as mentioned previously, the negative of this is out-weighed by the
plus of having consistency in the questions asked. The use of technical accounting
terminology was tailored depending on whether the interviewee had any accounting
training. The lack of terminology made several interviewees feel more comfortable and
stopped them apologising for „not being an accountant‟.
Interviews can also be very time consuming (Robson, 1993), however for this research
the cost of the time was compensated by the wealth of data gathered. Another
disadvantage can be the accessibility of respondents and this will be discussed in the
next section. Sekaran (2003) considers another disadvantage is when respondents are
interviewed when they are extremely busy or not in good humour. This impact was
lessened by ensuring that contact was always initially made through email. The
researcher found that initially telephoning potential interviewees had a negative impact,
as they answered the telephone at an inconvenient time and thus are usually unwilling to
participate in the research.
As well as twenty-two semi-structured interviews, informal conversational interviews
were utilised in this research. Informal conversational interviews are where questions
emerge from the immediate context and are asked in the natural course of a
conversation (Patton, 2002). This was particularly important for collecting data from
informants in an informal way such as during the networking sessions of NZICA‟s
Auckland Not-for-profit Special Interest group meetings. This was extensively utilised
in this study as several participants preferred to talk informally rather than having a set
interview time, which led to the ability to collect data from a wider range of informants.
Unfortunately, a limitation of these types of interviews, or conversations, is that they
can be less comprehensive than semi-structured ones, so that data organisation can be
quite difficult, as informal conversational interviews are not guided by the framing
questions as semi-structured interviews are (Patton, 2002). However, this negative was
again compensated by the wealth of data gathered from these informal conversational
interviews, of which seventeen were held.
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