Cele Bune! Managing Overseas Face-to-Face Interview Subcontractors

By Karl Feld

Imagine you’re driving a vehicle of unknown manufacture with dials you can’t read down a muddy or dusty dirt track with no name, to find a house with no number, to make sure your contractor’s employee interviewed the right respondent in a language you don’t speak. You’ve been doing this for days, maybe even weeks. There’s no running water, no electricity, no telephones, no mail service, and possibly no food other than what you’ve brought with you.

Welcome to collecting research data from most of the world’s people.

It’s the rare research organization that has its own global, or even single-country, infrastructure designed to support this type of work. Few firms have enough ongoing work to support such an infrastructure, and even fewer have the expertise to support it. In most cases, researchers use data collection subcontractors.

While this is not an unusual practice even domestically, what is of note is that on a global level, those subcontractors are usually umbrella organizations using country-by-country, second-degree subcontractors. In turn, in most countries those second-degree subcontractors are using independent contractors or geographically dispersed local companies for face-to-face data collection in remote locations. In the end, a researcher is often faced with receiving a final product that has passed through three tiers of subcontractors, each with its own set of standards and administrative processes.

Researchers can take two approaches to managing their projects and controlling the quality of the products received from these subcontractors. They can control quality from the interviewer level up and ensure that the third-degree subcontractor is doing the job right, or they can turn a blind eye to the process and trust the data they get. With these options, lurching down the muddy track in the middle of nowhere becomes a very real scenario for the discerning researcher. The author loved it. Most researchers do not.

Fortunately, this exercise can be avoided by making the right choice of data collection subcontractor from the outset and then following a few simple observational guidelines to make sure your overseas face-to-face project gets done right the first time. Interestingly, the same principles apply to managing all crosscultural, multilingual face-to-face research contractors, whether in the developed countries of Europe or elsewhere. They just require varying degrees of application.

It all starts with selecting a rock-solid subcontractor. This is partly a product of references, partly a product of price, and partly a product of the contracting process. Here, let us assume that your originating research organization has decided against building its own in-country teams to conduct the data collection (though this, too, is often a viable option and one the author has used).

There are various ways to identify global umbrella organizations or single or multicountry contracting companies, including directories that list companies providing such services. Another, less comprehensive, route is simply to ask around. International researchers are a small bunch and are often willing to share war stories and references. In the end, though, it all comes down to references and the contracting process.

References a researcher trusts are a crucial litmus test of whether a particular subcontractor is worth considering. There is really no other way to gauge subcontractors’ probable performance without knowing how they have performed in the past. References who conduct work similar to that involved in the proposed project and who spontaneously recommend a firm are the best source.

Requiring subcontractors to provide their own references who can attest to work similar to the proposed research is an important step in the screening process. In-depth discussions with those references can be extremely revealing. Since one can assume the firm has provided its best possible references, hints of dissatisfaction can be the tips of larger data collection icebergs that other, less favorable, clients would talk about.