Rebecca Sta Maria
Senior Project Coordinator
Advanced Leadership and Executive Development Centre
National Institute of Public Administration (INTAN)

Date: 25 October 2001
Time: 12.00-13.00
 

What happens when a person trained in quantitative research tries her hand at qualitative research? The process can be humbling, to say the least, In this paper I present my learning experience as I attempted to understand the impact of a mandatory change initiatives (ISO 9000 certification) in the Malaysian public sector. I looked at three organizations that had obtained ISO 9000 certification. I interviewed three persons from each organization and one person whom I considered my key informant. For data analysis I used content analysis, which was driven by a specific theory, i.e., Concerns Theory as defined by Hall & Hord’s (1987) Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM). CBAM posits that individuals affected by an organizational change initiative or innovation implementation have their own concerns about the innovation/change initiative. The theory further posits that individuals will experience different stages of concepts during the change process and that unless these concerns are effectively addressed by the changes agent/organization, the change initiative could be short lived or ineffective. Because I was a novice at this type of research, I rigidly tried to find parallels between theory and my data. In hindsight, I realize that I should have let my data speak to me so that I could have critically analyzed the theory in the context of the Malaysian public sector.