## 3 Methodology
### Data Collection  
Our target was public companies that outsourced their communications service/information systems to create a strategic category that was relational of the contractor attitudes towards IT outsourcing. All of the IT services that were relevant to the contractor attitudes were considered to validate their strategic behavior.  
The companies were selected from a database that was compiled by the Industry Syndicate of Espirito Santo State (Brazil), located in Vitoria, that contains information on 1180 industrial firms. A questionnaire was sent to 532 companies that were selected for their examination to request the information on outsourcing relationships. A total of 247 questionnaires were returned (46%). The high response rate was achieved because we only contacted the companies that outsourced their IT needs, thus reducing the possibility of a non-response bias occurring. Table 1 presents the sampling process in three phases. The data that were analyzed in this study were collected from the sources that are shown in Table 2 between April 2018 and June 2019 in Brazil.  
The research used pre-test scales in which adaptations were made, thereby generating the questionnaire that was used. The items that were under analysis in the questionnaire were assessed using a 7-point Likert scale, where the extremes were: 1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly agree. Figure 1 presents a workflow with a summary of the explained methodological process.  
The companies that hire IT services often take a static position in the relationship. In other words, the IT contractors expect the suppliers to transform their business. In this sense, it is necessary to consider the role of the IT contractor within the relationship. Consequently, it is crucial to adopt a dynamic and distinct posture in each of the outsourced IT services, considering the project's characteristics that are in development. Therefore, to achieve satisfactory levels of the relationship between the IT contractors and the suppliers, all of the technical or traditional services must be coordinated and monitored by the contractors [59; 60].  
A summary of the companies which answered the questionnaire, according to [PERSON] et al. [29], is presented in Table 2. The companies that outsource their communications services/information systems were the target of this study.  
Based on the analysis of the data that were collected using a questionnaire, a strategic behavior categorization in ITO was developed. This study considered the cluster analysis technique to (i) group the IT contractors, (ii) validate the strategic behavior categorization, and (iii) analyze the related attitudes. For this purpose, the methods that were recommended by [PERSON] et al. [61] were used: (a) hierarchical grouping to determine the number of clusters to be formed, and (b) non-hierarchical grouping to formulate the final cluster.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Items** & **Description** & **Percentage** \\ \hline Number of employees & 0–100 & 44.7\% \\ Number of employees & 101–500 & 47.3\% \\  & 501–1000 & 8.0\% \\ \hline IT Team size & \textless{}5 & 62.9\% \\ IT Team size & 6–20 & 33.0\% \\  & 21–50 & 4.1\% \\ \hline Experience in IT outsourcing (Years) & 0–3 & 9.73\% \\  & 3–6 & 31.98\% \\  & \textgreater{}6 & 58.29\% \\ \hline Type of contract & Standard Contract & 44.9\% \\  & Custom Contract & 28.74\% \\  & Informal SLA (without contract) & 26.36\% \\ \hline Contract period (Years) & 0–1 & 23.88\% \\  & 1–3 & 36.03\% \\  & \textgreater{}3 & 40.09\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} Note. Extracted from “_A Tiplogy of Relational Attitude in IT Outsourcing: An Analysis on the Contractor’s Perspective_, by [PERSON]; [PERSON]; [PERSON]; [PERSON], 2021, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Volume 1367, p. 298. Copyright © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.  
\end{table}
Table 2: Participating companies’ summary according to [PERSON] et al. [29].