Essentially, this is the concept that data should be collected from different sources in order to help show the same conclusion will be met from different data collection sources. As such, the participants will be asked to bring with them any data they provide in terms of documentation of insider threats, their own notes and strategies to combat those threats, and finalized security briefings that are available for this research review and utilize within the data collection process. It is well-known that some of the data desired here will be too sensitive to actually be used, however, there is a wide enough breadth of options that will allow participants to bring some form of alternative data that can be used to help measure the reliability and validity of the data collected from the interview process.
After data collection, data analysis. After each and every interview, the researcher will focus on coding and categorizing the bulk of the interview content by utilizing a number of field notes that were presented by Groenewald (2004) and outlined in Shank (2006). There are four layers of field notes that can be taken during the process of the interviews and directly after that will help with this process. First there are observational notes, which focus on the observation of the interview and the contents seen within it. Then there are theoretical notes, where the researcher begins to pull out...
Third comes methodological notes, which are typically written either before or during the interview process and can help future interviews in terms of reminding the interviewer to do certain things at certain times. Finally, there are analytical notes which are typically written right after the interview had taken place. These are some of the more portal notes for the later coding categorizing particular themes. Abstract summaries of all the interviews are needed in order to be able to categorize them by particular themes. Summaries will also be written for each of the documents the participants supply to augment the interviewing process.
Once field notes are thoroughly taken down and organized, the researcher will then set out to pull out certain codes that can be placed into categories. Several categories from each interview will be pulled out based on the frequency of particular words, digression of topics, and overall tone of the participant during the interview. Summaries will help categorize interview content and documents provided based on certain codes. The ones that are most frequent among a number of different interviews can then be used to make assumptions regarding the nature of insider threats and what should be considered as warnings before they actually are able to cause damage on a cloud computing platform.
