Challenges faced by young business professionals in using English as a language of work: Piloting a long interview guide

Abstract

The present study reports on the piloting of an interview study designed as the first phase of an exploratory sequential mixed methods research project (Creswell, 2014). The aim of the project is to explore the difficulties and challenges young business graduates face when they start work in an international environment. The interview study was designed to increase the depth of the analytical categories to be investigated in the quantitative phase. The primary aim of the pilot study is to reveal the weaknesses of the research instrument and the way in which the interviews were conducted so that the quality of the interview guide could be improved. The pilot study also contributes to the development of the researcher’s expertise, and since in the qualitative research paradigm the researcher acts as a research instrument (McCracken, 1988), to the trustworthiness of the inquiry (Patton, 2002). The results show that the piloting process contributed to the improvement of the researcher’s interview skills regarding the use of planned and floating prompts (McCracken, 1988), as well as the interviewer’s ability to manufacture distance (McCracken, 1988). Moreover, the piloting process provided information as to how the interview guide should be modified to elicit the richest possible data.