Whole Life/Life Cycle Costing During the Design Stage of a Construction Project: A Qualitative Review

Methodology

Three tiers of research were sequentially carried out for this paper; an in depth literature review, two semi structured interviews and a focus group were held with industry professionals and qualitative analysis. The information gathered through the literature review is enhanced by the gathering and interpretation of further results from the Qualitative analysis. The semi structured format was chosen as it was felt it was the best way to elicit as much relevant information as possible as one question can lead to another and gives the interviewee an opportunity to provide as much information as possible and freely express their thoughts and opinions. All interviews were anonymous and nothing would be included to identify practice or employee. Results from the interviews / focus group were then inputted into qualitative mapping software to be analysed. This allows the unstructured information gathered to be mapped, structured and documented in a way that shows relationships between clusters in the data. The software used is Decision Explorer by Banxia

Figure 1.

Research Methodology Flowchart (Author, 2020) Source: Author

Qualitative Analysis And Results

The interviews and focus group took place over a number of days with Architectural practices and their employees in the island of Ireland.