Organisational Structure as Barrier or Support in the Personal Social ...

The second step was to ask social workers to distribute the questionnaire (with stampedenvelopes) to their clients. Social workers stressed that participation was completelyvoluntary and anonymous, that the research was completely independent of the social servicesorganization in the parish and that there is no way to check if the client responded to thesurvey or not. This procedure was somewhat more successful and generated 100 answers (52percent of the answers in the final sample).Third sampling procedure comprised asking PSS-organisations to sample about 200 of theirclients, if possible representing all the different categories of errands. The exact details ofsampling were left to the judgement of each of the PSS-organisation. Survey questionnairewith a stamped envelope was then posted to clients in question. In total we posted 600 letterswith questionnaires and stamped envelopes for returning post. The response frequency for thisprocedure was also rather low (11 percent), partly depending on the fact that PSS-officessometimes did not have their client’s factual addresses (interesting indeed). Only 64 clientsanswered the survey, which accounts for 34 percent of the final sample.All the answers to the “paper version” of the survey were typed in manually into the on-lineversion of the questionnaire. In that way a common data matrix for all survey data wascreated.AnalysisThe processing of data has so far been restricted to univariate and bivariate analysis. Thebivariate analysis was made as cross tabulations using type of PSS-organisation as anindependent variable. Despite the fact that significance testing using Chi2 is a violation ofassumptions (because of the non-random sample) we used such testing in a heuristic way.10