Aimée L Felton 2012

58 in order to maintain an ethical approach towards the research, questions regarding this topic will be structured, allowing the participants to provide the information within corporate regulations, for potential further exploration at the interview stage. During the construction of case study information databases, sensitive financial information was regarded as a non compulsory data set, in order to provide this element of corporate discretion. Semi-structured interviews were designed to elicit a wide range of information regarding the organisations’ current maintenance practice, how the strategy aligns with current corporate goals and whether the future life of the historic buildings is considered within these strategies. This form of research was chosen in order to answer predetermined questions, generating information crucial for the analysis of the hypothesis but also to utilise some conversational questioning in order to gather a limited spectrum of opinions, concepts and ideas developed through earlier quantitative data collection. Audio recording was utilised as a method to collect raw data for later analysis, thus preventing long and detailed notes during the meetings and also provided the opportunity to filter out irrelevant and insignificant data at a later stage, also facilitating more detailed analysis. Transcripts and results from questionnaires were analysed against the criteria established at the beginning of the research in order to help standardise the reliability of the results. Following results of preliminary questionnaires sent to the participating organisations some one-to one meetings were conducted.Wherever possible all secondary interviews were conducted through face-to-face meetings, although when necessary telephone interviews were utilised. The aim of the secondary SIX Six•Three Qualitative Data Collection Chapter Six - Methodology Aimee Felton