comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

CHAPTER 4: METHODS AND METHODOLOGY
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain and as far as they
are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
In the study of the relationships between individual values as predictors of leader
behaviour preferences different between samples of businesspeople from Guangzhou
City, China, and New Zealand, I find the details of methods are especially important
concerns; hence I will discuss them early, as the third chapter. The concerns are due to
the difficulty in making comparative analyses, e.g. between samples from societies
speaking different languages, particularly for reliability and validity estimates of
research instruments. Discussion of these issues at this point in the thesis is important to
set the stage for discussion of past research and to qualify findings in the literature
review chapter.
METHODS
I provide reasons and support for the choices of methods following a well-established
methods tradition in major cross-cultural social science research projects, those carried
out under the direction of Inglehart (1977), Hofstede (1980), Schwartz (1992),
Trompenaars (1993), and the Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour
Effectiveness (GLOBE) project (House et al., 2004), I selected a positivist approach
based upon field study survey research as the method for my project. Field study refers
to collecting data “in the wild” from people engaged in the behaviours we wish to study
in the customary environment for the behaviours. Survey research is a quantitative
method, requiring collecting standardised information from or about the subjects being
studied. The purpose of a survey is to produce quantitative descriptions of some aspects
of a population of interest. Survey analysis can be concerned with relationships between
variables, or with projecting findings descriptively to populations of interest. In survey
research, the way of collecting data is by asking people predefined structured questions
that refer to themselves or some other unit of analysis. The data is collected from a
relatively small sample of the study population, in such a way as and large enough to be
able to generalise the findings to the population. The sample size must be large enough
to allow extensive statistical analysis. For lengthy discussions of the method see Babbie
(1990), Lavrakas (1993), Weisberg, Krosnick and Bowen (1996), and Krosnick (1999).
144