Page 138 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

to accept the important knowledge, in a powerful fashion? How is the situation of dependence between consultant and recipient, experienced during the KT process?
Section G: The established SVC’s gained by the KT process, through the advisory service
The following questions were included in section E. How does the home- organisation benefit from the transferred knowledge by the consultants? Was the knowledge provided by the consultants applicable, understandable and feasible for the management and employees of the home-organisation? Are the “operations” changed by the introduction of new knowledge by the “convincing power” of the consultant? Does the home-organisation experienced improvements in the financial and organisational directions? Have the implemented improvements created sustainable values for the home-organisation in the longer term? Is the home-organisation willing and able to invite consultants again?
Most part of the questions in the research questionnaire were composed so that respondents would have to agree or disagree with the statements presented within the questions. These questions visually reminded those which are based on Likert-type categories, but in order to avoid controversy, related to Likert-type data analysis, namely that such data is often treated as interval though it is actually ordinal (Cohen et al, 2000; Blaikie, 2003), the respondents were asked to evaluate each statement using 5- points scale, where 1 represented the lowest level of agreement (complete disagreement) and 5 stood for the highest level of agreement (total agreement). What made these questions similar to Likert scales was that both of these extreme points of view (‘completely disagree’ and ‘totally agree’) were given in the captions of such questions in text form in order to help the respondents.
The risk for omission of definitions has been recognised. Therefore, to be sure, in each distributed questionnaire, a list of definitions was incorporated. Pilot interviews and test-questionnaires are discussed with potential respondents to reach a common understanding on the scope of the research and the approach of the researcher. A general understanding of the content and the quintessence of the questionnaire was assured and validated by respondents (See Appendix III and Appendix IV).
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