5. Methodology
5.1 Sample and data collection
The key respondents for this study were executives in manufacturing บริษัท (buyer’s บริษัท) responsible for managing their บริษัท’s relationship with their suppliers. Interviews with executives in บริษัท that were involved in supplier development were conducted to learn more about supplier development and to help in the development of the survey constructs. The interviews also helped us identify the types of job titles in an organization that were involved in supplier development and other supplier relationship building activities. A self-report survey was then developed online to collect data for the study. Once the survey was created the authors invited academic researchers and industry experts to test the survey. This was to ensure the face validity, readability, and understandability of the scales. It was also to ensure that key informants could answer all the questions in the survey. Changes were made to the scales to reflect feedback from the participants. Once the changes were made, a pretest was sent to 180 potential respondents out of which 64 fully completed the survey. The response rate for the pre-test was therefore 36 percent. Modifications were made to the survey based on the pre-test after which the final survey was administered. In the final survey, 971 executives were contacted and 338 responded providing a 35 percent response rate. To pre-qualify the respondents, they were asked if their job involved working with their บริษัท’s suppliers. This is because our interviews and discussions with industry experts indicted that managers who worked with suppliers would be able to answer the questions in our survey. Only those who indicated that they worked with their บริษัท’s suppliers were asked to respond to the survey. Respondents to the final survey came from 18 different