Given the fact that the construction industry is a complex sector comprising a myriad of organisations and types of construction (BIS 2013), it was decided to use the survey strategy as this option offers flexibility, whilst allowing the research to view the issue of delay from different perspectives (Fellows and Liu 2015).
4.2 Data Collection and Analysis
Survey data can primary and/or secondary with the former typically taking the form of interviews or questionnaires and the latter referring to published data. There are merits to both, for example interviews provide a mechanism to gather detailed information from a selected sample of professionals at the forefront of construction projects, whereas questionnaires facilitate the collection of a large volume of data from a sample of professionals in construction in a relatively short period of time compared to interviews. It is further argued that there is also merit to the use of secondary data as this enables the topic of delays in construction to be assessed from the expert perspective or from studying current practice in the construction industry (Farrell 2011; Fellows and Liu 2015; Naoum 2012).
It was decided that in this instance the research required two forms of data collection, namely secondary data drawing on the actual experiences from construction projects with respect to time management processes used in contemporary construction and primary data collected using a questionnaire. It is argued that the secondary data will provide detailed information which will be used alongside the data gathered in the literature review to develop the questions for the questionnaire. The data collected will be analysed using statistical, descriptive analysis to ascertain trends in the data and to answer the research question posed in this study (Bryman and Bell 2011).
4.3 Limitations and Ethics
There are potential limitations associated with this methodology, including the need to find a representative sample of professionals to participate in the study. This is an important point as the sample needs to be representative of wider opinion in the population that is the construction industry. As such the sample will be selected using the researcher’s contacts in the industry and the questions will be used to confirm that each participant has sufficient knowledge and experience of the construction industry in the UK to contribute to the study (Grove et al. 2009).
The research will include the collection of data from non-vulnerable human subjects, as such the researcher will conform to the accepted norms of academic study, by explaining the purposes of the study, the way in which the data will be collected and by avoiding the collection of personal or commercially sensitive data (Bryman and Bell 2011).
This dissertation is a substantial volume of work, therefore to negate the limitations of poor time management and missing key deadlines for the study, the research will be conducted as set out in the programme of work illustrated in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1. Programme of Work.
5 References
Alashwal, A.M. and Fong, P.S.W., 2015. Empirical study to determine fragmentation of construction projects. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 141(7), p.04015016.
Arashpour, M. and Arashpour, M., 2015. Analysis of workflow variability and its impa
