Privatization in Developing Countries - Assignment Example

For less popular and new research topics, it is important to use primary data collection methods because in such cases, secondary data collection methods are just a waste of time and resources. For popular topics on which research work has been done by others, both primary and secondary methods are good to use, however, secondary methods are the appropriate ones (Creswell, 2002). The selection of a particular method does affect a research work positively or negatively. Therefore, every researcher should have full awareness of the pros and cons of each methodology.

As it is discussed above that for choosing a methodology for data collection, the researcher must know what his/her research type is. For instance, we have a topic of privatization in developing countries and our chosen company and country are Zain Company and Kuwait respectively. Zain Company is a private telecom company in Kuwait therefore, it is hard to find any sort of secondary data to complete our research on this topic and company. Although, we have access to secondary data on the topic of “privatization in developing countries”, however, it is hard to find secondary information on my chosen country and company. For the successful execution of our research, we have opted for primary data collection methods and our proposed methods are interviews and surveys. Our main focus of the research on this particular topic is to find the answer to the question “do the private sector was able to manage the telecom sector?”.

This is something very particular to a single country and to a particular business sector therefore we will make our way through interviews and surveys from the concerned people of the company and of this particular sector. Interviews and surveys help a person to gather first-hand data that may be published by an organization for personal use or can be gathered by asking frequent questions from concerned people (Flick, 2011). In our data collection, Dr. Saad Albarrak and the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Statistics will help us. For surveys and interviews, one can use an open interview method or a focus group approach. We would use both methods in our research, but we prefer to use an open interview approach because focus groups have almost common and structured information from limited resources. It is good to avoid focus groups because focus groups usually never share their feelings and opinions openly, they may not respond quickly and they may feel uneasy about a certain topic that is important enough for a researcher (Gill, 2008).

We have divided our methodology into three sections: gathering general data through secondary means about the topic, conducting informal open interviews, and arranging meetings with a few focus groups. We have almost completed the first part of our research and have gathered numerous data, and we have a proper plan to follow for the next two parts of the research. In our first part, we have gathered information about privatization in developing countries, its advantages and disadvantages, and privatization in Kuwait. For the next two parts of our research, we have designed questionnaires for surveys with a sample of 80-100. The reason behind choosing a relatively large sample size is to have more accuracy in the outcomes of the research. Studies have shown that a large sample size broadens up the quality of observation and reduces the effect of outliers. It also reduces the effect of extreme observations and hence the researchers become able to get more accurate and diverse information (Creswell, 2006).

On our way to complete research while finding answers to the question “do the private sector able to manage the telecom sector?” we will use qualitative interviews. Qualitative interviews are unstructured and semi-structured interviews that will not only help us in getting a point of the concerned people but will also help us in understanding the social phenomenon. Such interviews are found helpful in drawing results from conceptualizing the interviews while considering epistemological and ontological assumptions linked with the research interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008).