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3 - The research participants: accessing and reciprocity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Pranee Liamputtong
Pranee Liamputtong
Affiliation:
La Trobe University, Victoria
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Summary

Gaining access into marginalized communities is not an innocent undertaking; such entries are always fraught with ethical considerations.

(Subedi 2007: 56)

Gaining access to potentially hard to reach populations is a great challenge. Some groups are not only hard to reach geographically but may also be culturally, socially, or developmentally resistant to participating in … studies'.

(Lindenberg et al. 2001: 135)

How do we make contact with individuals and ask them to participate in our research, particularly if they do not wish to be found? Locating potential research participants can be a challenging and often problematic task. Many people are reluctant to enter the research field, as they do not ‘trust the researchers’, and may have other priority concerns (Liamputtong 2007a). Some groups, such as Hispanic Americans, have high mobility rates due to their employment and other issues and hence locating these groups can be a great challenge to researchers (Lange 2002). Because of this, recruiting research participants can be a formidable task for those carrying out cross-cultural research, and particularly so when the research is involved in sensitive issues.

In this chapter, I shall discuss several issues relevant to accessing potential research participants. I also provide some strategies which will assist researchers to gain access to and maintain relationships with the participants, so that their research projects may run successfully.

Type
Chapter
Information
Performing Qualitative Cross-Cultural Research , pp. 58 - 85
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Berg, J. A. (1999). Gaining access to underresearched populations in women's health research. Health Care for Women International 20, 237–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crowley, J. E. (2007). Friend or foe? Self-expansion, stigmatized groups, and the researcher-participant relationship. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(6), 603–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Salmon, A. (2007). Walking the talk: How participatory interview methods can democratize research. Qualitative Health Research 17(7), 982–993.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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