ABSTRACT
Access involves gaining entry to people, to places, to organisations or to documents. Access is negotiated in advance but gaining access is not a one-off process; access may be extended as trust is developed, for example, if the researcher’s presentation is seen as appropriate and ethical guidelines are being followed. Access to people in organisations is invariably facilitated by key informants who can help explain the context in which the organisation works and guide the researcher in developing a suitable observation or interview strategy. Clearly, access in some contexts is unlikely, for example, few
researchers will be able to gain access to presidents and prime ministers or ‘leaders’ of industry or be able to observe decision making in ministries or within global conglomerates. However, access may also be a difficulty in more everyday contexts. In many countries, for example, access to schools is only granted after checks have been carried out and access to prisons (at least for research processes) is understandably time consuming (Schlosser, 2008). Underlying restrictions on access is an unwillingness to expose organisational practices to public scrutiny alongside deep-rooted ethical and practical concerns. At times, there is a culture clash between researchers and their ‘good intention’, and ‘gatekeepers’with particular concerns for their own organisations and justifiable fears of seeing it misrepresented. Unrestricted access is likely to be difficult if not impossible to
achieve and this can seriously affect the design, planning, sampling and carrying out of research. Many new researchers often worry that they have failed in their projects by being unable to gain access to enough informants or respondents or have been denied observations of key events. However, all the researcher can do is to make reasonable efforts and consider the significance of any gaps in data collection: research is the ‘art of the possible’, which is why opportunistic or convenience sampling features so commonly in real-life contexts. There are some who argue that access should be gained covertly in
some contexts so that the researcher pretends to play a role in order to minimise ‘reactivity’ or the observer effect. This applies, of course, largely to observation studies and has been called ‘covert participant observation’ (Bulmer, 1982). Examples of covert research are numerous; most notably, Goffman (1963) carried out research into asylums in the USA by taking on the role of an assistant athletic director. In the UK, Hockey (1991) researched the ‘negotiation of order’ within the army while a member of a troop, and Fielding (1981) researched a ‘neo-fascist’ organisation while masquerading as a member.
