Rabea

Rabea talks to her friends about asking the Ferrari world theme park if she can conduct in-depth interviews with ten employees about their experience of working there. They say she’s unlikely to get permission: the time she wants to collect data is their peak season, so employees are unlikely to be released from their duties to be interviewed.

Rabea is disappointed; but more than that, she’s now worried about whether she can save her project. How can she abandon it after spending so much time reading extensively on the context of theme parks, and the conceptual topics of emotional labour, workplace socialization, and how organizations ‘manage’ the emotions of their employees. Rabea arranges a meeting with her project tutor so that she can ask about next steps. She wants to be proactive and show that she’s already thought about alternative research designs, but realizes that she might also need to re-think her topic. She notes down a number of questions to ask her project tutor:

(1) What’s the difference between primary and secondary data, and what sort of secondary data could be relevant for the research project?

(2) Can I (Rabea) just interview employees about their emotional labour at the Ferrari world theme park without asking the theme park’s permission?

(3) Can I use data from personal blogs and unofficial websites which expose grievances felt by employees?

(4) Is there scope for me to undertake an empirically-based Masters project on theme parks and emotional labour using only secondary data? If so, what kind of secondary data might be available that relates to emotional labour within the theme park context?

Questions

Imagine you are Rabea’s project tutor.  How would you respond to Rabea’s above four questions?