3.3 Research strategy
3.3.1 Research methods
The rationale for the application of a mixed methods approach was out-lined in the previous section, in the following all three methods are dis-cussed in the order of their application. Figure 7 provides an overview of the research approach and highlights the interplay of the applied methods.
Figure 7 Mixed method research framework
The starting point is the study of the lived experience of entrepreneurial failure. To pay attention to the social embeddedness (expressed in the PhD study by the social style) of the individual failure experiences, a method that allows the researcher to take a more active role in studying the entrepreneurial practice a method seems to suit best for that purpose.
In-depth, semi-structured interviews help the researcher to investigate the phenomenon through co-constructed narratives developed by the re-searcher and their inter-subjects (Drakopoulou Dodd, Pret, & Shaw, 2016). Data yielded in this first study will be analysed by application of
Archetypes of Entrepreneurial Learning from Failure Lived Experience of
Entrepreneurial Failure
Strategies to ensure Learning from Failure
Failure Learning, Social Styles, Versatility
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Q-methodology Learning behaviour association test
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an interpretative phenomenological approach (see sub-section 3.3.1.1) and learning-specific information will be used to develop the concourse for the second study, where Q-methodology, a hybrid research technique, has been applied to understand strategies to learn from failure (see sub-section 3.3.1.2). Additionally, all participants in the first and second study have been asked to take part in an online assessment aiming to collect data for the third study, a quantitative test to discover associations be-tween personal behaviour styles and learning strategies (see sub-section 3.3.1.3).
3.3.1.1 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Over the past decade several academic entrepreneurship journals have dedicated special issues to the area of qualitative entrepreneurial research.
However, in entrepreneurial and organisational research are still an over-whelming majority of quantitative studies that are being published. Often quantitative research is easily accepted as the standard, agreeing that a finding is a fact, rather than an opinion (Gartner & Birley, 2002). Howev-er, entrepreneurship research addresses individual persons with certain interesting attitudes or behaviours that sometimes makes them to “outli-ers” in the community (Gartner & Birley, 2002). Therefore, just adding up numbers or calculating mean values does not seem to meet the de-mands of research with regard to the entrepreneurs’ lived experience.
Scholars such as Anderson & Starnawska (2008), Berglund (2007), Cope (2005), and Seymour (2007) urge researchers to use interpretative ap-proaches and philosophical phenomenology and phenomenologically in-spired methodologies to join “the myriad dots that comprise entrepreneur-ship” (Anderson & Starnawska, 2008, p. 228). Leitch et al. (2010) show that interpretivist entrepreneurship research can make a contribution to
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the development of the field by establishing quality through the ethical and substantive validation of the design and execution of the research. A study design aiming to capture attitudes towards risk in an entrepreneurial environment has been proposed by Heinze (2018).
The aim of the research was to take a phenomenological hermeneutical view of the lived experience of failure. Lindseth & Norberg (2004) illus-trate how the comprehensive understanding of the lived experience re-veals new possibilities for being in the world. The research seeks to pro-vide an insight into the process of sense-making after the experience of failure, taking into consideration impact from the social environment from the entrepreneur's perspective. The study was carried out based on the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) devel-oped by Jonathan Smith and colleagues (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009). IPA was chosen as it allows the researcher to move beyond the text and to interpret the experience through insights derived from the re-searcher’s own experience (Harper & In, 2011). An IPA approach allows the researcher to examine how people experience and explain major events in their life (Smith et al, 2009). The authors call these occurrences a person’s “lived experience”. IPA is rooted in three fields that build the pillars of the method: phenomenological psychology, hermeneutics and idiography.
Phenomenology aims to study human experience and the way in which human beings perceive things as they come into consciousness (Langdridge, 2007). Phenomenology was developed as a branch of phi-losophy by Edmund Husserl and later influenced by Martin Heidegger who gave a central focus on understanding existence. Further important contributors were Jean-Paul Satre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice
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leau-Ponty (Langdridge, 2007). Three concepts are required to accom-plish the aim to identify the “essence of phenomena”, the underlying structures of the thing in its appearance to perception: 1. Intentionality;
2. Noema and Noesis; and 3. Epoché. Intentionality refers to the consid-eration that whenever a human being is conscious, one is always con-scious of something. On that account the focus of our awareness is turned out on the world. Langdridge (2007) states that, as a consequence of in-tentionality, there is a move away from differencing between subjects and objects and instead focussing on what is experienced and the way it is experienced. This move brings us to the concept of noema (what is expe-rienced) and noesis (the way it is expeexpe-rienced). Langdridge (2007) offers a quite understandable example about an imagination of a future success that builds the base for my own example: When imaging getting my doc-torate (what is experienced), then I visually imagine also the settings of the graduation ceremony (my clothing, my family, my feelings, the speeches) as the way how getting the doctorate will be experienced. The third concept Epoché (which is often referred to as bracketing) raises the necessary attempt to avoid presuppositions and “see the things in their appearing” (Langdridge, 2007). The latest concept is most debated; some scholars argue that it is not possible to bracket off assumptions about ex-periences (Langdridge, 2007). These ideas of phenomenology as a philo-sophical concept are applied by psychologists to establish the branch of phenomenological psychology that focuses on human experience and in-volves the psychologist to engaging in people’s “lived experience”.
That leads to the second pillar of IPA: hermeneutics, the theory of inter-pretation. Heidegger was the scholar who expressed the case for herme-neutic phenomenology. Following his ideas, IPA examines how a phe-nomenon emerges and brings the analyst in to facilitate and explain this
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appearance (Smith et al., 2009). Drawing on Huxley’s citation from the beginning, the researcher interprets the game by observing the chess play-er’s behaviour and under consideration of existing rules (knowledge and experiences). The third pillar of IPA is idiography, the concern with the particular. As Smith et al. (2009) state, IPA is committed to the particular in two ways: 1. in the sense of detail and depth of analysis and 2. in ana-lysing how a particular event has been perceived by particular people in a particular context. The idiographic approach leads to an increase in the esteem of single case studies as methods for qualitative research.
IPA has only recently developed and is still a nascent method in entrepre-neurial research, however, the rigor of the method (Smith, 2011) and the meaningful and broadly accepted findings of some the entrepreneurial studies published so far (see for example Cope, 2011) give room to con-duct a detailed examination of the lived experience of entrepreneurial failure by application of the method.
3.3.1.2 Q-methodology
The data from the first study has been analysed by application of IPA. As learning from failure is one of the prevalent themes in the entrepreneurs’
failure sense-making (see also Cope, 2011; Heinze, 2013; Shepherd et al., 2016; Ucbasaran et al., 2013), the IPA study yielded rich data for the sec-ond study introduced in this sub-section. To develop a scientific frame-work to bear on the elusiveness of the subjectivity of individual experi-ences of the failed entrepreneurs, a certain diversity in perspective and approach is required and there is a call for a novel hybrid methodology in order to shed light on concealed pattern within the subjective experiences of individuals (Blackburn & Kovalainen, 2009; Shepherd, 2015). Due to the historically developed dichotomy of qualitative and quantitative
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methods a “dual-class society” still exists in entrepreneurial research (Chlosta, 2016, p. 111) and there is some acknowledgement in the re-search community of the need of both qualitative and quantitative meth-ods individually and in combination in the course of a single study (i. e.
Berger & Kuckertz, 2016; Kuckertz & Prochotta, 2018). Q methodology, which is both a technique and a methodology was developed by Stephen-son (1935, 1953), seems to be promising in that regard. The aim of the technique is to provide a tool to systematically study subjectivity and to analyse diverse attitudes, perspectives and experiences. By application of a qualitative sorting technique, unstructured data can be categorized and statistically analysed. Despite Stephenson’s introduction of the method about 60 years ago, the method has only recently started to raise attention in the research community. Some good examples for the field of psychol-ogy are Bolinger & Brown (2015), Goodyear, Lichtenberg, Tracey, Claiborn, & Wampold (2005), and Nilsson (2018), for entrepreneurship research Babcock-Lumish (2005), Gruenhagen & Davidsson (2018) and Valliere (2019), and for education Sinclair (2019).
The typical benefits of Q methodology include insight into the percep-tions and sensemaking of individuals at a level where broad social forces are enacted within individual agency. Explicitly, the goal of this Q study is to create opinion groups based on participants’ evaluation of meaning-fulness and significance of different failure learning strategies and learn-ing outcomes. For that purpose, Q provides a more systematic approach and higher methodological transparency than purely qualitative methods.
However, the focus still is on quality of insight, not quantity and there-fore, small diverse samples are used. As Brown (1980) presumes, distinct viewpoints on any topic are limited and therefore, any set of statements clearly reflecting a broad heterogeneous range of opinions, and
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ed by diverse participants, will reveal the existence of groups with similar viewpoints. Q-sort procedures are particularly well suited for inductively deriving categories from individual responses to build theory (Kerlinger, 1964).
3.3.1.3 Failure learning association tests
Failure learning can be seen as a niche of individual behaviour that is also rooted in human traits, a field of vast interest for research for about a cen-tury. In 1921, the publication of Frank Knight’s book “Risk, Uncertainty and Profit” has been a starting point into research on the personalities of entrepreneurs to shed light on traits that set them apart from employed managers. That was followed by research on traits that prompt people to start and grow their own business (Kerr et al., 2018). However, the per-sonality approach to entrepreneurship has been much criticized in the en-trepreneurship literature, as personality traits cannot be strongly enough related to entrepreneurship (Aldrich & Widenmayer, 1993; Gartner, 1988;
Low & MacMillan, 1988). Although there is agreement that certain traits are significant for entrepreneurial performance (see for example Leutner et al., 2014; Rauch & Frese, 2000), a behavioural approach seems to be more promising for the purpose of this study, as it would be interesting to observe likely associations between the failure learning model resulting from the Q-methodology study and existing behavioural models. Com-mon inventories on personal behaviour are the Myers-Briggs Type Indica-tor (MBTI), the DiSC Personal Profile System and the Social Style Mod-el. The latter has been applied for the research as this inventory does not only offer the benefit of an additional peer evaluation, but also includes an assessment of versatility, a concept that expresses how skilled people are to adequately managing their behavioural preferences. Furthermore,
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according to Kraiger & Kirkpatrick (2010), who did an empirical evalua-tion of all three inventories, the Social Styles model has shown ad-vantages for participants in both measures training and behaviour.
The Social Styles model defines behaviour as an observable result of per-sonality consisting of traits, values, beliefs, motivations and measures.
Personality attributes are rooted in genes and early live experiences, the environment and difficult to change in adulthood. As behaviour is di-rected by personality, individuals tend to develop behavioural patterns based on their effectiveness and comfortability to get the desired respons-es (Myers & Pfaffhausen, 2016). In that sense, the Social Stylrespons-es inventory is based on two continuous scales and measures observable behaviour in four dimensions.
The horizontal scale is called assertiveness, which is defined as the way individuals attempt to influence others, moving from “ask assertive” to
“tell assertive” behaviour. People with ask assertive behaviour tend to use indirect methods of influencing more often, whereas people that are more tell assertive likely to prefer direct methods of influence. The vertical scale is labelled responsiveness and is defined as the way a person shows feelings and emotions in their social interactions. Task-directed people tend to primarily focus more on the task at hand and control their emo-tions, whereas a people-directed person primarily focuses on relationships that affect the task and prefers to show emotions (Leimbach & Bailey, 2017; Myers & Pfaffhausen, 2016). Figure 8 shows an overview of the model.
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Figure 8 Scales and dimensions of the Social Style model
Source: own illustration, adapted from Myers & Pfaffhausen (2016, p. 28)
The third component of the Social Styles model is versatility, which is defined as a person’s ability to manage their behaviour in an attempt to meet concerns and expectations in their social interactions with other people. Versatility is measured separately from Social Styles and it is de-scribed as a social skill that is likely to change over time and dependent from environmental circumstances and that can be developed to improve the quality of social interactions in general and leadership success in par-ticular. The concept of versatility is designed as an instrument “putting EQ to work” (Tracom, 2014, p. 6). Like Emotional Quotient (EQ), a syn-onym for Emotional Intelligence (EI), the model has several sub-components and it focusses especially on aspects of EQ that are relevant for workplace situations (Tracom, 2014). A study by researchers at Colo-rado State University compared Versatility with two different measures of EQ, Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (SREI) and Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) and found significant
Task
People
Ask Tell
Analytical Driving
Amiable Expressive
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correlations: 0.88 with TEIQue and 0.78 with SREI (Tracom, 2014).
Therefore, by application of the Social Styles Inventory, the study may yield important findings on whether failure learning behaviour is related to participant’s general personal behavioural pattern and / or versatility as an expression of emotional intelligence.