Interviews

I conducted twelve unstructured in-depth interviews with researchers selected for their different organizational location. Most of the descriptions of collaborative research in the literature come from researchers based in university settings. The goal of this research was to capture other perspectives. To gather data from people from various kinds of backgrounds and interests, I sought out researchers working in different non university-based associations.

In trying to get some insight into whom to interview, I talked to Dr. Shauna Butterwick, a committee member who has extensive experience working with community groups. Based on her suggestions, I produced a list of institutions that I knew had carried out collaborative research projects that included both university as well as non university-based researchers. Through several contacts I found the names of the people who were in charge of doing research for those institutions, if any. By December 1998 I started contacting these researchers and asking for referrals from people in key positions within those institutions (see Initial contact letter in Appendix A). With this information, I produced a list of interviewees.

Once I had collected the data from the interviews, I also gathered information about each of the organizations the interviewees work in. The interviews became the main source of data with the institutional information serving as background for some analyses. I describe the interviews in detail in the next section.

Conducting the interviews

All twelve interviews were held in participants' workplaces. In most cases the conversations were held in their offices. Interviews lasted between ninety minutes to two hours. I taped the conversations and hired a professional transcriber to do a verbatim transcription of the tapes. I conducted interviews from December 1998 to February 1999.

All interviewees seemed very hospitable and happy to answer my questions. Some became uncomfortable as I asked some questions that pointed at aspects of collaboration that are not specifically emphasized in the work they do. Still, they tried to answer my questions. Interviewees also asked questions, especially regarding my Argentinean experiences and the motivation to pursue this topic for my doctoral research. A couple of them also asked questions regarding the project and timelines.