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written notes, spoken words and any relevant actions (provided no one strays too far from the line-of-sight of the webcam).

Three-way conferencing could allow me to ‘eavesdrop’ and record other interviews but Chinese Broadband speeds would cause the quality to be too low and when the interviewers can be in the same physical location it could be ‘unnatural’ to use videoconferencing. Instead, webcams (one on the interviewer and one on the respondent) can be used and the captured data compressed, encrypted and shared through a cloud such as SkyDrive [5] . Live Scribe data can be shared the same way.

However, the technical aspects are fairly simple to implement and attention needs to be applied to the interview instrument as well which is given in Appendix A. This was drawn up considering two main aspects: response and relevance.

The response aspect was whether questions were likely to produce replies by considering ease of answer, appropriate language and unlikely to cause embarrassment. Also, descriptive questions are placed at the start to ease both interviewer and respondent into the session and the end questions are clearing house probes to pick up anything the respondent wanted to say that wasn’t addressed by earlier questions.

The main body of questions was created to be directly relevant to the study to allow rich description, reflection and opinion to emerge where possible. Peterson and Behfar (2005, pp.156-158) put forward a hypothesis of six statements regarding group leadership that they claim ‘finds empirical support at the individual level, but as yet is largely untested at the group level’ (see Appendix B). Two of these statements, 1 and 4, have been used as the basis for questions because of their direct relevance to my research question and I also felt there might be opportunities to test these. This schedule would also benefit from being examined and tested by others, including the co-principals, before use to help improve its content validity

As a scientist (albeit it holistically educated) it has been very challenging to work in the social sciences where ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’ have very different meanings. Also, I normally deal with quantitative data. I chose this project partly because it deals with qualitative data as I hoped it would be a better learning experience for me. My next challenge is analysing qualitative data.

9. Methods of Data Analysis

A mass of data is collected in qualitative investigations and this means looking for patterns and relationships, being aware of the limitations of the analysis, justifying why data has been included or excluded and above all being systematic. In short, making sense of the data.

For any analysis, interviews first have to be transcribed. With only four interview transcripts I would first attempt to analyse the data using manual analysis with a pen, paper and spreadsheet. However, a more sophisticated method may be needed.

To find meaning in from the data in the transcripts, Glaser (1978, p.6) indicates that grounded theory can also be used.

‘Grounded theory method although uniquely suited to fieldwork and qualitative data, can be easily used as a general method of analysis with any form of data collection: survey, experiment, case study. Further, it can combine and integrate th