Making Contact & Gaining Access

The access process proved to be the most time consuming and, at times, frustrating aspect of the research. I began approaching organisations and individuals in May 2000 to request the contact names and addresses for recipients of introductory letters. In most cases I selected the manager, chief executive, or director of the targeted organisations as the initial contact and possible interviewee. In some cases, however, the organisation and/or representative were selected because of their high profile in the policy debate and/or authorship of policy documents. Once again, the Internet proved to be a valuable resource and I was often able to access names, phone numbers, and addresses via the targeted organisation’s website. I identified additional participants by phoning the organisation in question and requesting the name of someone who could be contacted in relation to my research. Occasionally, I was redirected to people in a variety of positions before locating someone who was willing to be identified as a contact and/or was conversant with the topic. Sometimes this course of action would lead nowhere and I would have to begin the process again. On one occasion, I was redirected to the Executive Officer of a consumer organisation who was more than willing to participate in the research, as well as provide additional documentary information. This circumvented sending the introductory letter and I was able to make an interview appointment straight away. Once a contact name was provided or located, this person was sent a letter of introduction or contacted by telephone. Sixteen organisations and two individuals were initially contacted for interviews. Of these initial contacts, twelve organisations and the two individuals agreed to participate in the research project.

On 8 June 2000, I sent fourteen letters to the selected interview participants or institutional contacts in Wellington and Auckland. These letters described the research and asked for the recipients’ participation or that of a nominated representative (see Appendix E for a copy of the letter). Potential interview participants in Christchurch were initially contacted by telephone and the first telephone access was made on the 9 June 2000. I used this approach in Christchurch because I had established a previous research relationship with some of the targeted organisations. I also wanted to shorten the access process so that I could commence the local interviews prior to starting those in Wellington or Auckland. These initial interviews helped me refine the interview process and indicated some additional interview topics to include on the

subsequent interview guides.27 _{However, access to contact names and possible interview}

participants continued to be a complicated and time-consuming process.

The original strategy was to follow the introductory letters with a telephone call within the ensuing two weeks to establish the recipients’ and/or organisations’ willingness to participate, and to organise interview times if appropriate. However, one of the targeted recipients contacted me the day he received the letter to arrange an interview date and time. Another emailed me to inform me that she was leaving the organisation and that her position would cease to exist. However, she had passed my letter on to her manager had undertaken to contact me with an alternative representative. The enthusiastic response by these two people was reassuring and I was encouraged to hope that gaining access to interviewees would be easier than I had originally anticipated. This confidence was short-lived and I managed to confirm only three interviews after contacting eleven organisations with the follow-up phone calls on the 14 June 2000. One of the confirmed interviews was with the person who had rung me two weeks earlier and another was with a provider representative who would be overseas when I was intending to be in Auckland. Fortunately, this representative agreed to a telephone interview when he returned to Aotearoa/New Zealand. One contact for a government organisation declined an interview because he felt the organisation did not have anyone currently working in the ART policy arena and, therefore, did not have anything to contribute to the debate. The remaining contacts were not available or had referred my letter to someone else, who had not had an opportunity to read it. I noted the new contacts’ names and arranged to make another set of calls the following week.

My first experience of ‘gatekeeping’ involved the information officer of a government organisation who refused to provide me with a direct contact when I phoned that organisation in May 2000. She suggested that I email the introductory letter directly to her and she would then pass it on to those she thought were appropriate. I had hoped to avoid such tactics by targeting those at top of the ‘institutional hierarchy’. Although I recognised that all my contacts were gatekeepers to some degree, I reasoned that it would save time to target those people whom I assumed would have the ultimate responsibility for approving their organisation’s participation in the research. This strategy did not work in all cases as personal assistants or secretaries often vetted the recipients’ mail and proved to be gatekeepers in their own right. One state organisation, with which I negotiated access through a gatekeeper, refused to

participate after I had sent the introductory letter to the nominated representative. I had not been able to talk directly to the targeted participant and I was suspicious of this decision, speculating that my request was considered a low priority and I was being ‘fobbed off’. This proved to be a valid suspicion when, a month later, the Chief Executive of the organisation contacted me after she finally received my letter. She expressed concern that I had not received a reply. However, she justified the decision not to participate by arguing that her organisation performed an advisory role rather than an active policy-making role and she believed that the organisation would not have anything further to contribute to the debate. I was left with the impression that the outcome may have been different if my letter had reached her desk first and I had been able to talk directly to her when I made the follow-up phone call. Gatekeeping occurred more frequently in relation to government organisations, where initial contacts appeared to be far more wary about participating in the research than those in non- governmental organisations and private enterprise. Nevertheless, some of the larger private organisations also refused to take part in my research project. Again, my contact with these organisations was with gatekeepers and I suspected that the request had not reached the intended participants. However, this reticence may have been a consequence of the contact’s position in a hierarchically structured institution that requires the employee to operate within a context of loyalty and formal procedures (Green & Thorogood, 1998:163).28 _{Furthermore, it}

may have reflected the lack of priority given to ART matters by some organisations, as well as institutional resource and time constraints that preclude employees spending time on projects outside their own organisational responsibilities. People were being approached as named commentators and were required to make public statements on behalf of their organisations on a controversial topic and this may have acted as a disincentive to involvement in the project. In order to establish a timeframe in which to schedule the interviews I verified air travel times and availability before contacting potential participants. As it was necessary to confirm the interviews before finalising travel arrangements, the delay in contacting people meant that the window of opportunity in which to book airfares was closing. Finally, through a combination of repeated phone calls and email messages I confirmed one more Auckland interview and three more Wellington interviews. Consequently, I had scheduled only two face-to-face interviews in Auckland. While this gave me time to follow the additional leads that I had been given while

28 _{See Section 2.7, The Interviews, in this chapter for a discussion of how the interview participant’s}

trying to access participants, these proved fruitless as the people and organisations involved could not see me within the timeframe I had allowed or they were not available. I had managed to arrange five interviews in Wellington over a period of three days. However, this meant doing two interviews a day and left little latitude for changes in schedules. Before leaving for Wellington I had to reschedule two of these interviews because of changes in the participants’ schedules. This proved a complicated process as I had allowed little time within which to negotiate changes and I was unable to change flight bookings because of the financial consequences and the availability of seats. There was less urgency in arranging or changing interview times in Christchurch and, although I had arranged and completed two interviews before leaving for Auckland, I continued the access process for these interviews once I returned from the North Island. An additional interview in Dunedin was scheduled when the participant contacted me after being notified of the research project by another contact.

Initially, methodological procedures for gaining access worked well. Nonetheless, it became obvious that accessing participants is time consuming and not as straight forward as my initial success suggested. Difficulties in contacting gatekeepers and their inability to access potential participants meant that timetables were disrupted and access strategies needed to be revised or adjusted. In retrospect, excluding obvious financial and time constraints, the snowball method of gaining potential participants would have worked well in this project. As mentioned earlier, many of the interview participants provided names of organisations and individuals that could have made valuable contributions to the research.29 _{Although I tried to contact some of}

the people recommended by other participants, only one responded to my overture and was available for an interview. Furthermore, the tightly constrained interview timeframes in the two North Island locations meant that the interview schedule was somewhat inflexible, particularly in Wellington. Consequently, interview opportunities were missed as information on additional commentators or participants in the ART policy arena could not be followed up and one cancelled interview could not be rescheduled. As with the selection process, access initiatives continued over several months, overlapping with interviews and the transcription process. The final interview participant was confirmed on 11 August 2000, three months after the first contact was initiated. In general, gaining access was far less troublesome with private organisations than with government organisations, where I had to negotiate with gatekeepers and encountered hierarchical decision-making processes. One positive outcome of locating

29 _{In some cases, potential interviewees were recommended by more than one person and others had}

potential participants via a range of intermediate contacts was that I gained information on the structure of the organisations I was trying to access, as well as insights into the policy process ‘on the ground’.