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Episode 2: Research design & field access
Hi and welcome back to the podcast about my research project on access to justice in the era of digital transformation in the public sector.
In this episode as I promised I will say more about the research design and methodology I have in mind for this project.
Since it is a comparative project that intends to include contexts from the Global South as well as the Global North, I am selecting different countries according to certain criteria. Whereas there is not much empirical work on access to justice and ombuds work, the existing scholarship often focuses on Europe. That’s why I decided to exclude European countries from my study. Instead, I am planning to include one country from each of the other continents, as far as it will be possible, in sum four or five countries.
I am using different criteria to get a very heterogenous sample of cases, such as population density, country size, the year that democracy was established in the country, and quite importantly I also included an index for digitalization. There are of course different possibilities and indices one could draw on, one of them being the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index which measures the propensity for countries to exploit the opportunities offered by ICT. The readiness index consists of aspects such as infrastructure, affordability and skills; and there are sub-indices for individual usage, government usage and social impacts.
So based on these different factors, and others that I will mention in a minute, my first filed trips will go to Canada and two Caribbean islands.
Let me briefly explain what I am thinking about when I say it is a comparative project.
I have been asked a few times already how it will be possible to compare the cases that will be so different. I have to say that I don’t see that as a problem: even though the contexts will be very different in many aspects, my assumption - which is also based on literature - is that the challenges that people encounter with regard to access to justice and also with regard to digitalization, and equally the challenges that ombuds institutions encounter and the measures they take, all these challenges are likely to be similar in many aspects despite contextual differences. So, I’m interested in the commonalities among the different cases, but at the same time I will also explore what is specific about each case; for instance concerning the effects that the size of the territory and the distribution of the population has on the issues I am investigating, that is access to justice and digitalisation. And of course, even if the challenges are similar among the different cases, they might take place at different levels or to varying extents - some countries will be more progressive than others for different reasons.
So now a few words on the selected cases. My plan is not to do desktop research and to investigate primarily documents, but I am interested in
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people’s practices. I want to study on-site how citizens interact with the state, or more concretely with the public administration; and I want to talk to ombuds staff and observe their everyday work with citizens and their complaints. So, it’s going to be field work with qualitative, partly ethnographic methods. If you have some experience in qualitative research you might know the challenges and hardships related to gaining access to the field, especially when public bodies are concerned, and especially if you try to establish contact without personal interaction, based on email communication.
For the last couple of months I have been contacting ombuds institutions in selected countries and I received very different reactions. While some ombuds institutions don’t respond at all, some take several weeks or even months to reply, and a few others reply very quickly. Some ombuds staff that I have been in contact with have reservations to letting me study their work: a typical reaction is to use confidentiality as a pretext for not allowing a researcher to be on-site, although this is rather irrational because of course researchers have to adhere to data protection and ethical standards; otherwise it would never be possible to do institutional ethnography or in-depth research in public bodies. But luckily there are other ombuds institutions that have been very welcoming, interested in and supportive of my research.
In Canada, for instance, I have received support by the Ombuds Office of the Northwest Territories on the one hand and by the Protecteur du citoyen in Quebec on the other. These institutions will be my first stops on my field research journey in order to study the ombuds’ work and to interview citizens as well as government officials and other experts on the challenges coming along with digitalized public services.
As I said, other countries’ ombuds institutions that I have contacted have been partly less responsive. That’s where we come to the issue of feasibility. Of course, I can only carry out my research where public ombuds institutions are willing to cooperate; and to do that they also have to understand that it makes a difference whether I study documents and do online interviews with staff or whether I am on-site and can participate, observe, and also talk to citizens and other stakeholders.
In a nutshell, field access is essential for my research questions to be answered. Therefore, I need to be very flexible and open in the entire research process, and that includes the selection of countries for my study.
During the Board Meeting of the IOI which took place in May 2023 in Vienna and that I already mentioned in the first episode, I had the opportunity to talk face-to-face to the ombudspersons of Curaçao and Sint Maartin, and each one staff. The conversations about the situation concerning digitalization and access to justice on these two islands was very interesting, and it seemed that they would be very worthwhile to be included in the study, among other aspects because of their postcolonial context.
I want to say a little more on the challenges of gaining field access:I have already mentioned the difficulty of establishing contact via email. Related to that one major issue is the element of time. As you can imagine, such field research needs a lot of planning ahead, but at the same time contacting the ombuds a year before my planned visit is often too early, so it is important to find the right timing. Then we have to bear in mind that communication with public bodies - and public ombuds are also public bodies - can often take quite some time, especially when contact persons have to clarify things with their superiors, obtain approval, etc. Then, another problem related to that issue is the fluctuation of staff. When I have been in good contact with one person, the interaction may take a very different direction when a new staff takes over, often with longer time lags because there are many other and understandably more important things than communicating with a researcher when one takes on a new job. And then, only when it is sure that I have access to the institution, I can start thinking about how to best reach the citizens - for instance via different community organizations.
Adding to that, there are quite a few other things that influence the possibility of field research and that can change relatively quickly - things that have also happened in some countries where I have been in contact with ombuds institutions, such as an escalating socio-political situation; but also environmental crises can become a problem for field research. In NWT, for instance, some places I have planned to visit had to be evacuated because of the devastating wildfires this August. I don’t want to be misunderstood - these are difficulties for research but of course such situations are catastrophic for the people living there.
So although being a field researcher is not always easy, I still thinks it’s a great job to have; until now I had the impression that there is always a solution to a problem.
There is a lot more to be said about methodology, for instance concerning research with Indigenous peoples or generally doing research in different cultural contexts as a white European researcher, or the necessity of applying multiple parallel recruiting strategies for being able to interview citizens, or all the organizational work that needs to be done for such field trips; but maybe there will be time for those issues in another episode.
Before I’m now coming to an end with this episode, I just wanted to say a few words on the time intervals that the episodes of this podcast will be released at. Since the podcast is not intended to be the main outcome of the project - as the focus is still on scientific publications - I plan to produce an episode to report on the project’s development approx. every two months.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.
Thanks for listening and stay tuned!