Hi,

Wondered if anyone had any experience approaching policy makers / NGOs for interviews?

Where I know people I'm sending them an email with an information sheet attached, but I don't know whether it would be better to 'cold contact' people by email, phone, or letter. All seem to have pros and cons.

Would appreciate input.
Thanks!

my industrial partner is a government dept and I have to cold call people and do snowball sampling otherwise I would have nobody :-(

How do you find people respond to being called up out of the blue?

I did my interviews with civil servants in a government department and contacted almost all of them by email. I found that it was easiest to start with people who I had some connection with, however small - i.e. we had been at the same conference, or my supervisor had once met them. In some cases I did tell a little white lie, like if I knew we had been at the same conference I would say "It was great to meet you at x conference" as an opener because I knew they would not have the slightest recollection of whether they had actually met me before or not. Not to deceive them - just to establish a small mutual connection.

In the email I included a brief description of my research but focused on what I would like to ask them about in the interview. Tailor it as much as possible to the person you are contacting so that you can say "I would like to find out about your experiences of working on x policy" and show that you have found out a little bit about them beforehand. I also said something about confidentiality - i forget exactly how I worded it but something along the lines of the interview would be anonymous and they would be able to see any quotation used in the thesis.

Finally I would say contact at least twice as many people as you actually need to speak to, because a lot of people will ignore you. I don't think I got any refusals at all, but a lot of people simply didn't reply. You need to be quite brazen and if someone hasn't responded within a couple of weeks, email or write to them again. Also if you do an interview which goes well it always pays to ask the interviewee if they know anyone else you should speak to - if they personally recommend someone it gives you easy access to more participants and the word will spread within the organisation that you are "sound".

Good luck - I found contacting people the most nerve-wracking part of the process! The interviewing will be fine :-)

I really focus on gaining buy-in from participants. I have a research statement which gives a little bit of background, what the interviews are about, how long they will last, how my research is feeding back to the organisation. Then also make sure all participants know that there will be a feedback report (AND ACTUALLY WRITE ONE!). Most participants I get are through a support network in the organisation, as mine is a specialised topic, and from there snowball sampling i.e. I ask participants to recommend people. Generally people either participant or ignore the emails etc. so no one every gets annoyed. Does take a lot of perseverence tho.