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Q U A L I TAT I V E R E S E A R C H C O N S U LTA N T S A S S O C I AT I O N 45 "People want to help you, if they can. There's something about introducing yourself that gets people to stop and pay attention." F inding interview subjects for research projects can be chal- lenging. When participants are exceptionally hard to find, what's a researcher to do? Why not try recruiting by intercepting? My team used this approach on a recent project when participants were difficult to locate. Hard-to-Find Participants Walk Among Us Typically, we focus recruiting on behav- iors. For our research needs the people we wanted to talk to do not take part in a desired behavior. Specifically, they don't vote. We did street intercepts because we couldn't figure out a way to find the peo- ple we wanted through any conventional recruiting method. How do you recruit on a negative behavior? Or rather, how do you find people who aren't doing some- thing, especially something they are likely to think they should be doing – so they might lie about it? It's not uncommon for retail compa- nies to have mystery shoppers who chat up other people in their stores. The head of Intuit, Scott Cook, instituted follow- me-home studies long ago, i.e., find someone in a store who is buying your product, have a conversation, invite them into your study, and then see if they'll let you follow them home and watch as they open, install, configure, and use your stuff for the first time. It's what Cyd Harrell and Nate Bold call "in-time recruiting." The user is in the moment, not just in the market. There's no ques- tion about the motivation. We wanted to learn about information challenges for people who are eligible, but not voting. This is less about being at the right time and more about being in the right place. We needed to go where these people might be. The Art of the Intercept Much of the success of intercepting people to do interviews and testing on the street has to do with how you design your approach. First, there's what you look like. We were researchers and we wanted people to understand that intuitively. A couple of things about us made that easy: We're two middle-class, middle-aged white women wearing sensible shoes and kindly expres- sions and carrying clipboards. One person asked me if I was a professor at the nearby university. Clothes are important. Props, like clipboards with signs on them and ID badges, are important. Smiling is impor- tant. But also, be comfortable. You may be on your feet for hours. Out in weather. So plan for being warm enough, cool enough, sun-screened enough, keeping in mind that you have to carry everything you need for the day without looking like a bag lady. In my previous intercept experience, I started by quickly saying something like, "May I ask you a couple of quick ques- tions about X?" But after I watched a pro – a colleague who works for the League of Women Voters registering people to vote – I tried different approaches with differ- ent people. But mostly what worked was some variation of: "Hi. My name is Dana. I'm a researcher and I'd love to ask you a couple of questions about voting and elections." There's something about introducing yourself that gets people to stop and pay attention. However, we ran into plenty of skepticism. So the follow-up often went something like, "I'm not selling anything. I don't work for any of the campaigns or par- ties. I don't have a petition. I just have a couple of questions. Ok?" That's usually all it took. By Dana Chisnell Director n Center for Civic Design n North Andover, MA n @ChadButterfly