DDBA 9000 Week 1 Proposal Approval Packet Example

The Proposal Approval Packet for a Multiple Case Study of Driver Retention Strategies Among Small Trucking Company Owners: Cover Memo, Alignment Page and the Methods Detail a Committee Needs to Picture the Study

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 9000: Doctoral Study Completion

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Proposal Approval Packet for a Multiple Case Study of Driver Retention Strategies Among Small Trucking Company Owners: Cover Memo, Alignment Page and the Methods Detail a Committee Needs to Picture the Study

Cover Memo

To: Doctoral study committee. From: Doctoral candidate. Re: Proposal for committee approval. Enclosed are the complete proposal, an alignment page and a log of the chair's last review. All 14 comments from the chair's review of March 2 have been addressed. One was resolved differently than suggested: the chair proposed adding a survey of drivers, and I have kept the study to owners' strategies, since the research question concerns what owners do, and explained this on page 22.

Alignment Page

[after]

Each row uses the same words for the population and the outcome, so the question can be traced from problem to data without a change in scope.

Table 1

Alignment From Problem to Data

Why a Multiple Case Study

Yin (2018) favored case studies for questions of how and why about current events that an investigator observes but cannot control, and he treated several cases as replications that show whether a pattern recurs. Owners' retention strategies fit that description: they are practices embedded in each company's routes, pay and culture. Four cases allow comparison while remaining manageable for one researcher.

Data Collection

Each owner will be interviewed once for 45 to 60 minutes using an interview protocol of eight open questions, recorded with consent and transcribed. Before the interview, I will request three documents: annual turnover figures for three years, the driver pay policy and the home-time or route policy. Follow-up member checking will share my interpretation of each interview with the owner for confirmation or correction. Birt et al. (2016) described member checking as a way to strengthen the credibility of qualitative findings by returning interpretations to participants, while cautioning that participants may not recognize or agree with analytic abstractions; I will therefore check summaries of what each owner said, not my thematic codes.

Analysis Plan

Analysis will move through Braun and Clarke's (2006) six phases, from repeated reading of every transcript, through first-pass coding and grouping codes into candidate themes, to checking, naming and writing up the themes. Codes will be applied to interview transcripts and documents together, so each theme can be traced to at least two sources per case. Themes appearing in at least three of four cases will be reported as findings; patterns in fewer cases will be reported as variation.

Saturation

Data saturation will be assessed by recording new codes in each successive interview and document set. Guest et al. (2006), coding sixty interviews from one project, saw new codes nearly stop appearing after roughly the first dozen, yet the point depends on how varied the participants are; with four owners, saturation will be pursued through documents and follow-up questions as well as interviews.

Interview Protocol Excerpt

The protocol's opening question asks owners to describe the drivers they have kept longest and why they think those drivers stayed. Later questions ask about pay structure, home time, equipment, dispatch practices and how the owner learns that a driver is thinking of leaving. Each question maps to part of the framework: pay and working conditions to the factors Herzberg called hygiene, recognition and responsibility to those he called motivators, so the analysis can test whether owners' strategies address both.

Role of the Researcher

I worked for six years as a dispatcher at a mid-sized carrier, which gives me familiarity with the industry and a risk of bias. I will keep a reflective journal and will not recruit any company I have worked with.

Timeline

Data collection will run for eight weeks after ethics approval, with analysis in the following six.

What the Committee Is Asked to Approve

Approval of the proposal as the plan the finished study will follow, including the population, the data sources and the analysis plan.

References

Birt, L., Scott, S., Cavers, D., Campbell, C., & Walter, F. (2016). Member checking: A tool to enhance trustworthiness or merely a nod to validation? Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1802-1811. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316654870

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). SAGE Publications.