essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– COGNITIVE MAPPING–––––––––– 81STEP 1Following each stage of questioning in the schedule, responses were written onto ‘Post-it’notes and then passed to the participant to check their accuracy.STEP 2The participant was then asked to arrange the ‘Post-it’ notes on the table to show how theywere or were not causally related to the concepts already elicited. This occurred after eachlevel of questioning.STEP 3As the participant explained the links, the interviewer sketched a map of the concepts showingthe direction of linkages.STEP 4The participant was shown the map and asked to check that it accurately represented theirviews after each set of concepts had been added.Coding the mapsBecause the method generated maps unique to each participant, it was necessary to code themap data to facilitate analysis. Here we used template analysis, which involves producing a listof codes (a ‘template’) representing themes identified in the data (King, Chapter 2, thisvolume). Here, the levels of questioning themselves were used to guide the initial codingprotocol (King, Chapter 2, this volume). In the work stress literature, there exist severalcategorization schemes for coding job conditions associated with emotions, coping andoutcomes associated with stress and emotional experience (Harris et al., 2002). We used someof these existing categorization schemes as initial templates. However the coding protocol wasrefined through several iterations of data coding following Huff and Fletcher’s (1990)recommendations to modify coding protocols as more experience is gathered with the data.In order to ensure reliability within the coding process, the data were coded independentlyby the interviewer and a second member of the research team. Disagreement was measuredand resolved through discussion (Harris et al., 2002, provide a fuller explanation).Analysing the mapsThe emotions elicited were initially grouped into three categories:1 pleasant emotions such as happy;2 low activation emotions such as bored; and3 unpleasant emotions such as anxiety.Based on concepts and links elicited from at least 30 per cent of each sub-samplecorresponding to each emotion category, aggregate maps were produced for each class ofemotion (see Figure 7.5 for an example). The aggregate maps revealed that there wereconsistent similarities between respondents in the job conditions and outcomes associated withdifferent kind of emotional experience at work. The method was able to detect differences