In the period of planning your study, it is important to find access to the field in which you want to work empirically. In some cases the most important step here is to identify a field in which the experiences are made that you want to study or
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in which the people you want to access can be met. In our project about health concepts of homeless adolescents in Germany (Flick and Röhnsch, 2007), for example, it was a major step to find out where people living under these circum- stances can be met, where they hang out, meet peers or turn to institutional help.
Then the most crucial step was to be accepted by the adolescents as someone to talk to or to let take part in everyday life in the street – thus making interviews and observations possible.
In other studies working in institutions, it is often necessary and time-consuming to find out who has to agree to your study and decide about letting you in for doing your empirical work. In schools or hospitals, there are often several insti- tutional levels to be involved before you are allowed to approach interviewees, for example. It should also be clarified which formal approval of your research has to be obtained and by whom. If institutional review boards or ethic commit- tees have to be involved (see Chapter 7), this is a sometimes complicated process that should be started early enough and sometimes requires methodological and theoretical clarifications and commitments that are difficult to make in the early stage of a project. Finally, you should reflect which sort of formalization you plan for your relation to study participants. Is it necessary, possible and advisable to make an interview contract regulating technical details of anonymity and data protection? Is this form of informed consent about the participation in the research something you can ask from your participants in a formal way? If not, who else can give you that consent, etc. (see Flick, 2006, chap. 4 for details)?
Finding access to fields, institutions or people can be a difficult and long process. Wolff (2004) describes problems and strategies you might meet in the field, which will make your access more complicated or are used for keeping you and research in general out of an institution, for example. This analysis shows that finding access is not just a step at the beginning of your field contact or some- thing that can be formalized by preparing an information flyer about your project. It is rather a negotiation running through several steps, facing immune reactions by the field (trying to send the ‘invading’ research back), based on per- sonal trust between the field and the researcher, finding gatekeepers who open the doors to the field and to the right persons, and being clear to the field of what you expect from it.
In this context, it is important to set up a basis of informed consent – that everybody knows they are part of an ongoing research and has the right and chance to say no to any form of personal participation – in the field and with your possible participants (see Chapter 7).
Both issues of this chapter are parts of the more general topic of building a research design for a qualitative study. Sampling is a major step in constructing the research design (see also Chapter 4), finding access determines how far the plan of research formulated in this design is going to work in the concrete research practice.
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Key points
• Sampling in qualitative research often follows a different logic than in standardized research.
• It should be oriented on some rationale according to which cases and materials are selected.
• Sampling can address different levels (sites, people, events, etc.) depending on your research question and the method you will apply.
• Sampling refers not only to selecting cases and materials but also to taking samples inside cases and materials (e.g. certain statements or parts).
• To clarify and find access to fields and people has to be carefully planned and can be a difficult process sometimes.
Further reading
In these works, issues of sampling are outlined in more detail in relation to spe- cific methods or in general. Wolff summarizes problems of access and discusses possible solutions.
Angrosino, M. (2007) Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research(Book 3 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit). London: Sage.
Barbour, R. (2007) Doing Focus Groups (Book 4 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit). London: Sage.
Kvale, S. (2007) Doing Interviews(Book 2 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit) London: Sage.
Merkens, H. (2004) ‘Selection procedures, sampling, case construction’, in U. Flick, E. von Kardorff and I. Steinke (eds), A Companion to Qualitative Research. London, Sage, pp. 165–71.
Rapley, T. (2007) Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis(Book 7 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit) London: Sage.
Rubin, H.J. and, Rubin, I.S. (1995) Qualitative Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage (2nd ed. 2005).
Wolff, S. (2004) ‘Ways into the field and their variants’, in U. Flick, E. von Kardorff and I. Steinke (eds), A Companion to Qualitative Research. London.
Sage, pp. 195–202.
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