**2. Materials and Methods**

This case study used six in-depth interviews with participants from four garden centers. The six participants (Table 1) were two more than the minimum number needed for a qualitative study as identified by Creswell [29]. The participants at each garden center (Table 2) included the owner and/or the employee most responsible for social-media marketing content. All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Committee for Research Involving Human Subjects/Institutional Review Board for Kansas State University (project #7183) on 19 May 2014.

**Table 1.** Characteristics of owners and employees at four garden centers in Kansas that were engaged in social-media marketing for their business.



**Table 2.** Characteristics of and marketing channels used by four garden centers in Kansas.

Note: B = blog, E = e-newsletter, F = Facebook, G = Google Plus, H = Houzz, I = Instagram, P = Pinterest, &T=Twitter; engagement rate was calculated on 24 October 2014.

A purposively-selected list of 23 garden centers was generated by a state university Cooperative Extension horticultural specialist with expert knowledge of existing Kansas garden centers. To be included in the list, the garden centers had to be located in Kansas, have exceptional products, good business practices, great customer service, and a presence on Facebook. Since qualitative studies focus on validity and generating a large amount of data from a few participants, the original list of 23 garden centers was scaled down to four garden centers. Two garden centers were selected for a high engagement rate on Facebook and two garden centers were selected that had poor engagement rates. The level of engagement was determined by using Simply Measured's [30] engagement metric which is defined as: engagement rate = (comments + likes + shares)/total number of fans. Simply Measured's [30] engagement rate allows accurate comparisons between Facebook pages. Each of the 23 garden center's previous 60 days' worth of posts were averaged and garden centers were ranked from highest to lowest engagement rate.

Participants were immediately debriefed by the researcher at the end of the interview. Interviews were transcribed by the researcher and a professor's assistant and were entered into NVivo10 (QSR International Pty Ltd., Doncaster, Victoria, Australia) for coding and analysis to determine common linkages and themes. Glaser's [31] constant comparative method assisted the researcher in categorizing participant responses into relevant major themes. Credibility, reliability, and transferability are essential components and concerns of a qualitative study, and the onus is on the researcher to demonstrate the findings result from data and not subjectivities [32]. Shenton [32] also indicates that compromising internal validity is a critical error in qualitative research. In order to mitigate any errors that could decrease credibility, all data was collected and analyzed verbatim with audio recordings and transcribed by the primary author and an assistant. Additionally, after concluding the interview sessions, all participants were debriefed by a researcher to maximize accuracy of the written data as synonymous with participant perception. The research team conducted face-validity analysis of the interview questions to increase validity of the results. External validity in qualitative research is in the eye of the beholder, and it is up to the reader to determine if the information can be generalized to his or her own socially constructed experiences [33].

Although in-depth interviews can yield rich and meaningful data in exploring the experiences of participants, caution should be used in generalizing the findings beyond the specific units of analysis under the specific situations in which they were observed [34]. However, qualitative results may be transferable to other like businesses in similar situations.
