helpful in preparing the interviews with the doctors and nurses in our project mentioned above.
Some of the costs will not arise in every project, some of the equipment is already available in your institution and can be used, sometimes you will not apply for funding or have researchers paid as extra costs, but do the research by your own in the framework of a dissertation, for example. But for a full financ- ing and planning, the costs mentioned above should be taken into account in order to avoid unpleasant surprises with running out of time and resources.
Special problems and stepping-stones linked to using specific methods will be taken up in Chapters 8–10 of this book.
Finding no access
Of course it is not possible in this context to foresee all the problems that might arise (but see Wolff, 2004, for some of them). But we can distinguish two sorts of problems here: for research in institutions, you have often to contact several levels of administrative decision-makers before you can get in touch with your research par- ticipants. Each of these levels can have reservations against research in the institution in general or your research (topic, purpose, effects, etc.) in particular. On each of the levels, you have to negotiate your entry to the field. Wolff (2004, p. 199) describes a repertoire of strategies in institutions to avoid decisions for and against a research inquiry. Here we find strategies of ‘wait and see’, passing the inquiry and the decision to the next (higher) level in the hierarchy, and the like. In each case, you will have to negotiate and respond to the suggestions or demands formulated by your counter- parts. Once your research has been formally approved by the institution, you will have to find access to the ‘right’ – i.e. relevant, experienced, informative, etc. – persons to convince them to take part in your research (e.g. by giving you an interview).
Sometimes you will meet specific reservations against one method or the other in some people (who do not like to be interviewed), while others will have no problems with the same request. Here, you have to keep in mind what it means for your sam- pling if you just include those people in your study who have the fewest reservations (Patton, 2002, speaks of convenience sampling in this context and discusses the prob- lems of this strategy).
If you plan your research in an open field, access may be complicated for different reasons. In particular, if you want to work with people difficult to find or access (hid- den populations, vulnerable people), you often have to approach institutions working with these people in order to find them. Here, you are often confronted with gate- keepers who for one reason or another are concerned about the effects of your research on the participants and want to protect them by not letting you get in touch with them. Such protective engagements may sometimes be necessary and justified, but it can make your research more difficult even if it was good for possible partici- pants to be involved. In such a case, you should be ready to have arguments for such gatekeepers why your research is not only important for you but also for your partic- ipants. However, you should be careful not to make promises you may have trouble in keeping later. In the example of our homeless adolescents and health project, we may produce results that can be used for improving support for this group by the health institutions. But before such an improvement can be effective, the single par- ticipants of our study may no longer profit from it – for example, because they are no longer adolescents. Having found access to the people you want to interview does not necessarily mean they are open to your question and to you as a person. Access and 58
entry have a lot to do with positioning yourself as a person to be trusted as a partner in dialogues, as being confidential and trustworthy and as someone competent in what you are doing or planning to do.
Matching methods and fields
In this context it is also important to reflect what you can expect from your field and your participants. Perhaps if you have developed an elaborate design, including different methods to be applied repeatedly, you will find out that this over-challenges your participants. If your potential interview partners face a tight time schedule (in their work, for example), you should reflect whether your inter- view planning will fit into such a schedule or should be planned to be shorter, for example. Sometimes it is difficult to find a room in which you can do an inter- view without interruptions by others, if you do your research in an open field, and it may be unlikely that your potential interviewees can travel to your institution for an interview. In such cases, you will have to adapt your design and methods to what is possible in the field or you will have trouble ending up with a suffi- cient number of interviews (with relevant people) when your project time becomes short.
Neglecting the participants’ perspective
It is also important to reflect what your participants expect from being part in your research. Sometimes it is a specific form of attention they look for.
Sometimes they may think they have something important to say beyond your topic. In such a case, you should try to be open about what information they have to offer beyond answering your questions and you should try to be flexible in the contact so that you can register this offer. Without losing the focus on your research interest, you should try to take your participants and their perspective seriously in your contact with them.
Associations instead of analysis
In an interview study, you will receive a lot of interesting statements. In partici- pant observation, you will see a lot of interesting things you did not expect and so on. In analyzing these data, it is important to keep a theoretical and critical per- spective on what you obtained and to scrutinize what was presented to you. You should try to be systematic in what you do with the data and not just associate to what was said, but develop structures in and from the data – for example, typolo- gies – or identify patterns in them. This will make it more likely that you find out something about the field you study, which was not yet known – to its members, to other scientists, and maybe to yourself beforehand.
Resources and stepping-stones
59
Conclusion
The lists of necessary resources and even more of possible stepping-stones pre- sented in this chapter are not exhaustive. But both can give you a first orientation of what to keep in mind while designing your research. They will be comple- mented in more detail in the chapters addressing methods (8–10) and in the other books of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit.
Key points
• Doing qualitative research is based on having different kinds of resources available.
• It is important to do a sound calculation of these resources in qualitative research when applying for funding or when you estimate the needs for your project.
• Major stepping-stones in qualitative research are linked to finding access and to making the methods fit to conditions in the field.
Further reading
In the following works, the resources and stepping-stones in qualitative research are discussed in more detail:
Flick, U. (2006) An Introduction to Qualitative Research(3rd ed.). London: Sage.
Marshall, C. and Rossman, G.B. (2006) Designing Qualitative Research (4th ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Maxwell, J.A. (2005) Qualitative Research Design – An Interactive Approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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.
60