Assignment task: The purpose of this exercise is to give you practice with elite interviewing and organizing the data it generates. Assume that you are conducting the interviews to inform the research question you've posed for your final project. Alternatively, you can select a question that's listed below (see question #1).
There are a few things to keep in mind as you embark on this activity. First, the experts you want to interview may not be eager to speak with you. Do not assume that they will be forthcoming with the information they provide. Second, the time you have to conduct interview is likely to be limited. For this exercise, assume you have no more than one hour of an expert's time.
(1) State the question that drives your research. If you do not have a question that easily lends itself to elite interviewing please pick one of the following options:
Why are some local party organizations in the U.S. more successful than others at recruiting candidates to run for office?
Why do some political parties in new democracies last longer than others?
Why do interest groups mobilize their membership for some lobbying campaigns and not others?
Why do some insurgent groups use violence to achieve their goals?
Why are UN peacekeepers more successful in keeping the peace in some conflicts but not others?
(2) Explain in one or two sentences how elite interviews can be used to address the research question you are using for this exercise. In other words, what can you learn about your research question from an expert that you otherwise might not know?
(3) Identify the population or category of elites you would like to interview. How and why can these experts help you answer your research question? Identify five real people who are in your sample of experts and explain why they are appropriate interview subjects.
(4) Develop three questions that you would include in your interview protocol. What information related to your research do you hope to glean from each question and why have you chosen to make the questions broad or narrow? Think carefully about what you want to learn from the questions you are posing
(5) Describe how you would transform an interview transcript into a document that could be used to code the interviews (think about the advocate summary from the Advocacy and Public Policymaking Project). Keep in mind that you want to generate variables relevant to your research question that will be comparable across experts/interviews. Identify and explain two variables that you would code from the interview data.