nurturing servant leaders in religious education - Scholarly ...

Data gathering
Data gathering took place over a six week period beginning in early July 2005.
Individual in-depth interviews were held with CES directors responsible for
overseeing the administration of institute in the Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland region.
After in-depth interviews, three focus groups were conducted with volunteer teachers.
To further triangulate data, classroom observations and document analysis were used
to round out data gathering methods. All interviews, focus groups, and observations
were held in CES teaching sites in Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland. Although the initial
invitation to the Country Director was extended outside the city, the director drove to
Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland to participate in the interview.
Personal interviews
Personal interviews were conducted with three administrators from the CES
responsible for overseeing the workings of CES in the Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland
region. Participants included the Aotearoa/New Zealand Country Director, and two
Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland directors. Directors opted to use a pseudonym, and will
be referred to in the data analysis chapter as Director A, B, or C to help protect
anonymity in answers. Question schedules were distributed two days prior to
interviews for directors to have time to think about the topic of servant leadership and
their answers. A meeting was held with the three directors as a group to clarify the
aims of the study and to answer any questions prior to beginning the interviews. As
the study also involves volunteer teachers whom the directors oversee, a focus group
meeting schedule was also devised in this meeting.
Interviews were scheduled to go no more than one hour. No one interview went for
more than this time, the average duration being approximately forty minutes.
Interviews were conducted consecutively on the same day with tape-recording being
the main method of collecting the data with minimal note taking.
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