Gaining and keeping interview access in political research: a South African case study

Abstract

This sine qua non for all survey researchers in the social sciences involves gaining access to and eliciting rapport with one's respondents. In a society as beset by emotionally‐held political values and passions as South Africa, this aspect of operationalizing a research undertaking assumes added significance. It is also in the research spirit enjoined in the above quotation that a detailed exposition is given of one such attempt to gain and maintain interview‐access to and rapport with, a group of white South African respondents. The article also examines the interesting phenomenon of those scholars whose fieldwork strategy has taken the need for this research imperative at a large discount.