Ravalier PhD Theis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

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3. Can an Appreciative Inquiry methodology be used to design feasible psychosocial stress interventions for the improvement of daily
hassles within a local borough council organisation
1) Design
Choosing an appropriate research method can be fraught with difficulty. For example Patton (1990) describes
the common debate over how to conduct research when there is such an argument over the best use of two
fundamentally different and often competing paradigms. To one extreme is the more traditional and often seen as
more scientific approach to research – positivism, which is associated with hypothesis testing via the use of
quantitative techniques. To the other extreme is phenomenological enquiry, which is based on the application of
qualitative and naturalistic approaches to understanding human experience.
Inherent within the design of the current project are both quantitative and qualitative approaches (see Figure
10 for an overview of the project structure). The study utilised quantitative techniques in the form of a survey
which consisted of two scales, with this quantitative element used to provide a contextual background analysis of
the participating organisation (PAO). The survey (which was distributed twice, once before the qualitative phases
and 12 months after) consisted of two separate questionnaires, one chosen because of its ability to separate
psychosocial factors found within the workplace which are both working well, and not working as well, and the
other a workplace-specific tool which assesses employee psychological health. These results therefore also form
part of the Local Stress Theory, as assumed in Research Objective 1 (see Chapter VIII Part 4, Section 10).