So as the end of my third year approaches, and the terrifying beginning of my fourth and final PhD year looms into view I’ve really begun to panic about my data collection.
The data that I currently have is amazing. The interviews I’ve conducted so far have tended toward the hour mark, with some exceeding it as both interviewer and interviewee seem to get carried away finding new topics and fresh perspectives on old ones. Every interview has been a fresh occasion to be amazed and inspired by the work that young women are doing not only for social and climate justice campaigns but also within their own lives and communities.
Participant observation in a wide range of activism and group contexts for over 150 hours so far has yielded insights into the complexity of organisation and interactions that are far more valuable than quantitative methods such as questionnaires would have
produced.
Even the diaries, although beset with their own problems of uptake and completion (I currently have 3!), have provided yet another viewpoint, not least on the huge number of hours that activists dedicate to their work; the back office, home and internet tasks that enable movements to function but which are largely unrecognised and undervalued.
And yet, with less than two months of my third year left I still need to interview 10 more people. My recruitment techniques have changed as time has gone on: initially I trawled the internet for groups and organisations that fit my anarchist/environmental focus and emailing them with information about the project and asking them to forward the email to their members. This elicited a few responses, but far fewer than I had hoped. Next I tried to publicise my research at events I was attending, such as anarchist bookfairs, and recruit participants face to face. This had a greater degree of success, but was hampered somewhat by my shyness. Most recently I’ve been using Twitter to try to recruit people: asking for retweets from people with relevant interests and followers. I was surprised by how many retweets I got, and at first was confident that this was *The Answer* to my recruitment problems, but while I had several offers, few have come to anything when I’ve tried to arrange interviews. All along I’ve been trying to use snowball sampling to reach people who are known to others, and in a one or two cases this has worked but not nearly as often as I would have hoped. Perhaps I’m not being persistent enough, but that’s
tied up with a bigger issue I’ll discuss below.
Problems associated with participant recruitment and retention are numerous on any research project and many of the standard issues of
time-commitment and access apply here but I’m finding recruitment for my PhD more difficult than I have on other projects I’ve worked on. I’ve been working through some of the issues in the faint hope of overcoming
them:
1)
One issue that I had anticipated, and which has proved to be the case, is suspicion from activists about the legitimacy of my researcher status. The intelligence gathering tactics used by the police are notorious (Mark Kennedy being a recent but by no means lone case) and activists are right to be wary of outsiders. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when my supervisor told me she’s had an email asking whether I was a genuine PhD student. She was able to reassure them that I wasn’t planning to use the data for anything other than progressive and academic purposes but I
imagine most people with concerns about my status won’t go to those lengths, rather they’ll just not respond.
2)
The second issue, and one that applies more widely than just my project, is that the people I am interested in talking to are incredibly busy. Although the time commitment is brief (generally a 1 hour interview in person or via Skype), it’s often just one more thing to try to shoehorn into an already packed schedule. The women I’ve interviewed are often working full-time, studying and campaigning for a number of groups at the same time. The issue of burn-out and over-commitment is one that I’m exploring in my research but I don’t want to contribute to it.
3)
I’m aware that referring to the participants I’m seeking as ‘activists’ may well lead some women to consider themselves ineligible.‘Activist’ is not an identity that is necessarily claimed by many who do activism, tied up as it is with issues of legitimacy and collective identity. I’d argue that this is particularly an issue for women. For some women cultural stereotypes around the abstract universal ‘Activist’ are such that it is incompatible with their own gender identities. Others undervalue their work (or have it undermined by others) to the extent that they don’t recognise their contribution in such a specific way. The ‘perfect standard’ that Chris Bobel has explored, one that is based on humility and rigor, is one that many women consider themselves to be unworthy of.
(Bobel’s work on menstrual activism is well worth a read, in particular her
article on ‘activist’ as a personal and collective identity:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742830701497277)
4)
Authenticity and legitimacy of identity are issues that apply to me as well as my target sample and I’ve been contending with that on two fronts, both as an academic and as an activist. Frequently I feel like a fraud in both roles, often regardless of objective evidence or personal testimony to the contrary, and it’s by no means unique to me. But this, in combination with a generalised fear or reluctance of asking things of other people, has made recruiting participants all the more difficult. While I’ve now overcome a reluctance to talk about my research from fear of boring people, asking people to participate in my research seems like asking too much of them, putting too many demands on their time, or affording myself an undeserved status or importance. It seems like nagging. The same illogical thought processes occur if I have to ‘chase up’ individuals who have dropped off the radar after initial email contact. Or if I’m following-up on diaries. Or if I’m trying to increase my sample through snowballing. One of my supervisors has said that I need to pester people, which is undoubtedly true because my current timidity certainly isn’t getting me anywhere. But first I need to feel entitled to pester people and that’s harder to do.
Over all I suspect there isn’t a magic bullet solution and that the way forward is to continue using all of the techniques I mentioned above to
attempt to recruit people, but with the looming shift to my final year the
pressure is on. Any advice or recommendations would be hugely appreciated so feel free to leave a comment. Don’t feel you have to though – I wouldn’t want to nag!
The data that I currently have is amazing. The interviews I’ve conducted so far have tended toward the hour mark, with some exceeding it as both interviewer and interviewee seem to get carried away finding new topics and fresh perspectives on old ones. Every interview has been a fresh occasion to be amazed and inspired by the work that young women are doing not only for social and climate justice campaigns but also within their own lives and communities.
Participant observation in a wide range of activism and group contexts for over 150 hours so far has yielded insights into the complexity of organisation and interactions that are far more valuable than quantitative methods such as questionnaires would have
produced.
Even the diaries, although beset with their own problems of uptake and completion (I currently have 3!), have provided yet another viewpoint, not least on the huge number of hours that activists dedicate to their work; the back office, home and internet tasks that enable movements to function but which are largely unrecognised and undervalued.
And yet, with less than two months of my third year left I still need to interview 10 more people. My recruitment techniques have changed as time has gone on: initially I trawled the internet for groups and organisations that fit my anarchist/environmental focus and emailing them with information about the project and asking them to forward the email to their members. This elicited a few responses, but far fewer than I had hoped. Next I tried to publicise my research at events I was attending, such as anarchist bookfairs, and recruit participants face to face. This had a greater degree of success, but was hampered somewhat by my shyness. Most recently I’ve been using Twitter to try to recruit people: asking for retweets from people with relevant interests and followers. I was surprised by how many retweets I got, and at first was confident that this was *The Answer* to my recruitment problems, but while I had several offers, few have come to anything when I’ve tried to arrange interviews. All along I’ve been trying to use snowball sampling to reach people who are known to others, and in a one or two cases this has worked but not nearly as often as I would have hoped. Perhaps I’m not being persistent enough, but that’s
tied up with a bigger issue I’ll discuss below.
Problems associated with participant recruitment and retention are numerous on any research project and many of the standard issues of
time-commitment and access apply here but I’m finding recruitment for my PhD more difficult than I have on other projects I’ve worked on. I’ve been working through some of the issues in the faint hope of overcoming
them:
1)
One issue that I had anticipated, and which has proved to be the case, is suspicion from activists about the legitimacy of my researcher status. The intelligence gathering tactics used by the police are notorious (Mark Kennedy being a recent but by no means lone case) and activists are right to be wary of outsiders. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when my supervisor told me she’s had an email asking whether I was a genuine PhD student. She was able to reassure them that I wasn’t planning to use the data for anything other than progressive and academic purposes but I
imagine most people with concerns about my status won’t go to those lengths, rather they’ll just not respond.
2)
The second issue, and one that applies more widely than just my project, is that the people I am interested in talking to are incredibly busy. Although the time commitment is brief (generally a 1 hour interview in person or via Skype), it’s often just one more thing to try to shoehorn into an already packed schedule. The women I’ve interviewed are often working full-time, studying and campaigning for a number of groups at the same time. The issue of burn-out and over-commitment is one that I’m exploring in my research but I don’t want to contribute to it.
3)
I’m aware that referring to the participants I’m seeking as ‘activists’ may well lead some women to consider themselves ineligible.‘Activist’ is not an identity that is necessarily claimed by many who do activism, tied up as it is with issues of legitimacy and collective identity. I’d argue that this is particularly an issue for women. For some women cultural stereotypes around the abstract universal ‘Activist’ are such that it is incompatible with their own gender identities. Others undervalue their work (or have it undermined by others) to the extent that they don’t recognise their contribution in such a specific way. The ‘perfect standard’ that Chris Bobel has explored, one that is based on humility and rigor, is one that many women consider themselves to be unworthy of.
(Bobel’s work on menstrual activism is well worth a read, in particular her
article on ‘activist’ as a personal and collective identity:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742830701497277)
4)
Authenticity and legitimacy of identity are issues that apply to me as well as my target sample and I’ve been contending with that on two fronts, both as an academic and as an activist. Frequently I feel like a fraud in both roles, often regardless of objective evidence or personal testimony to the contrary, and it’s by no means unique to me. But this, in combination with a generalised fear or reluctance of asking things of other people, has made recruiting participants all the more difficult. While I’ve now overcome a reluctance to talk about my research from fear of boring people, asking people to participate in my research seems like asking too much of them, putting too many demands on their time, or affording myself an undeserved status or importance. It seems like nagging. The same illogical thought processes occur if I have to ‘chase up’ individuals who have dropped off the radar after initial email contact. Or if I’m following-up on diaries. Or if I’m trying to increase my sample through snowballing. One of my supervisors has said that I need to pester people, which is undoubtedly true because my current timidity certainly isn’t getting me anywhere. But first I need to feel entitled to pester people and that’s harder to do.
Over all I suspect there isn’t a magic bullet solution and that the way forward is to continue using all of the techniques I mentioned above to
attempt to recruit people, but with the looming shift to my final year the
pressure is on. Any advice or recommendations would be hugely appreciated so feel free to leave a comment. Don’t feel you have to though – I wouldn’t want to nag!
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