BETHANY LACINA
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: INDIA
This is the story of the two times that I interviewed the wrong person.
The first one I will blame on the phones. I had been interviewing members of the Indian parliament and other members of the Indian political elite.1 It was going pretty well. I had quadrupled my consumption of milky tea and biscuits. I was filling up notepads with subjects’ reminiscences and hot takes.
Begging for interviews was in some respects easier than I expected. MPs generally had not only their office phone numbers but also their home and mobile phone numbers on the parliamentary website. (The government of West Bengal took the opposite tack. The state government website did not list a single phone number, not even a general line.) Indian MPs also mostly answered their own phone, and always answered their own mobile.
My real problem was my fraught relationship with my mobile phone. There were all kinds of technical oddities. Numbers had to be dialed differently for cell phones, land lines, long-distance land lines, and long-distance cell phones. Properly dialed calls were frequently dropped. I found it difficult to hear over any connection. Any ambitions I had of making calls in Hindi were quickly abandoned. At the time, I had communicate-with-a-street-vendor fluency, mostly because street vendors are masters of nonverbal cues. But over the distortion of a phone line, I could barely understand things said to me in English let alone another language.
I came to dread the customary phone greeting. Nobody identified themselves or their office when picking up the phone. Instead, the speaker would offer “Hello” or “Namaskar” or sometimes just “Ji?” (yes?). When I got someone on the line, I would antagonize them for the first minute by shouting back and forth about whether we could hear each other. Then I would further antagonize the speaker by not being entirely certain with whom I was speaking. I eventually established a rhythm of how to ask whether I was speaking to such and such a person. But being transferred remained fraught.
ME: May I speak to Mr. Singh?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Just a moment.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Hello?
Had the transfer gone through? Was I still speaking to Mr. Singh’s secretary or to the man himself? It had gone both ways for me. I had talked to secretaries in the inappropriate second person and to politicians in the inappropriate third person. It could be difficult to distinguish between a dropped call and a brush-off. One way to say “no” to a bothersome caller is to transfer the call like a hot potato between assistants and finally let the whole thing lapse. Was I getting the runaround, or was it just bad phones?
I had one near-catastrophe because of phone problems. I was trying to reach a retired general who worked at a think tank. Unbeknownst to me, this think tank also enjoyed the affiliation of an economist whose name differed from that of the general only in the final vowel. The economist’s last name ended with the “ai” (as in “chai”). The good soldier’s last name terminated in the “ay” (as in “Bombay”).
I called the think tank, asked the secretary to connect me to Mr. Bombay, and then went through my request to set up an appointment. I congratulated myself on another interview landed, not realizing I had been connected to Mr. Chai. I should have been tipped off by his jolly remark that “I’m more of an economist myself, but I’ll be happy to talk to you.” I thought the general was being precious about his Renaissance man interests. Fortunately, I figured out the ai/ay gaff between the time I arrived at the office and the beginning of the interview.
I was not so lucky on the Sunday of my second case of mistaken identity. My interview that day was with a notorious man. Call him Mr. Morgan Thomas Mitchell from constituency X. Mr. Mitchell had lost both his legs in an explosion when his old insurgent buddies tried to assassinate him. Such events raise questions that are difficult to phrase in a delicate manner: “So tell me about the time you broke with your coalition partners and restarted a civil war,” or “How’d you get so good at bombing trains?”
We had originally planned to meet on Wednesday at the MP’s office. Instead I met a secretary who told me to go to the MP’s residence on the following Sunday. This put me in a pretty good mood. If Mr. Mitchell was important enough to have a secretary who screened his appointments, who knew what fascinating political facts he would have for me?
On the ill-fated Sunday, I made my way to the guest house maintained by Mr. Mitchell’s home state. The same secretary showed me in and then sat down to take a phone call. I assured him that I knew I was a bit early and that I was happy to wait. I pulled out my newspaper. Then the secretary—who, to clarify, was not in a wheelchair and appeared to have had no amputations—said, “Well, shall we start?”
My mind raced: Is he going to do the interview for the MP? Is he the MP? How can that be? He is clearly not a double amputee. Is it possible that this is some kind of a con job; have I been lured into an interview with an impostor? And who would try to impersonate someone who did not have legs and not attend to that detail? Perhaps this is a kidnapping situation given that MP Mitchell was obviously involved with some intense people.
In short, I was totally flustered. In the best case scenario, this guy was the MP. I had been talking to him about “Mr. Mitchell” consistently for two meetings now. He must be wondering what could possibly be wrong with me. Also, I had prepared to interview someone whose military career had led to his opponents hiring his estranged supporters to blow him up. My questions were pretty specific to that sequence of events. Events that the man before me had evidently not experienced. After an excruciating hour or so, I stumbled back into the Delhi sunlight. I went home in a daze, wondering with almost idle curiosity what had just happened.
It turned out there was no blaming this case of mistaken identity on the phones. There were two parliamentarians from constituency X from the same party with rather similar names. One was Morgan Thomas Mitchell and the other was Thomas Morgan Mitchell. And, well, Mr. Thomas Morgan Mitchell was still recovering from the rather nasty attempt on his life. Mr. Morgan Thomas Mitchell and I had just enjoyed some sweet tea, Ritz crackers, and a low-quality discussion of Indian federalism.
After all my anxiety over dropped phone calls, awkward greetings, and muffled names, I had gotten my wires crossed without the help of any technology. My mind had skimmed right past the difference between two MPs’ names, and I had gone to interview the wrong one. Is there a lesson in all of this? Obviously, you should be more detail-oriented when it comes to names than I was. However, you should also aim to be as detail-oriented as I was when it came to the history and characteristics of my interviewees. Meeting with the wrong people was problematic and a bit awkward, but far worse mistakes would have occurred if I did not know they were not who I wanted to talk to when we met face-to-face. I could have asked embarrassing or insulting questions to my interviewees, or—even worse—I could have unknowingly included their responses in my work as if they were the correct people. That did not happen because I read up extensively on my interviewees before meeting them, which not only allows a researcher to ask sharper, more in-depth questions, but also to sniff out incorrect statements and, in my case, mistaken identities.
I suppose I never would have accidentally interviewed a civilian economist or a non-double-amputee if I had made all of my interview requests in person. That course of action also would have resolved my anxieties about India’s phone system. After all, is it not a fieldwork rite of passage to go to people’s offices and sit for weeks at a time, until the guru is finally willing to teach you? “Just show up” and “just keep waiting” must be two of the most common bits of fieldwork advice students receive.
Simply showing up is a tool that is becoming less and less useful. The sit-and-wait method exploits a couple of advantages that were more reliable in the past than they are now. First, just showing up is less useful in a world where more people have mobile technology and can be on the move throughout the workday. These tools make people schedule themselves more tightly and occupy time that might otherwise have been free. For example, in Home Style, Richard Fenno mentions that many useful conversations happened when he was riding in a car with a politician2 because the respondent had nothing else to do. In a world of cellular data plans, Wi-Fi, laptops, and tablets, that kind of interview opportunity is gone.
Second, the sit-and-wait strategy trades on the novelty of having an academic or a foreigner around. Cultural globalization has done a lot to erode that novelty. American political scholars have found that fewer elites are willing to talk with political scientists as the number of requests grows exponentially. In other field sites as well, elite respondent fatigue is a real possibility. Most important, in the just-show-up method, the researcher is betting that he or she can loiter indefinitely without trouble. Development, bureaucratization, and worries about violence mean that more and more official places have security guards, guest passes, and other conditions that simply do not allow for loitering. Also, permission to loiter depends on a researcher’s race, gender, and other identities. As field researchers become more diverse, loitering becomes a less universally useful strategy.
When I did my field research more than ten years ago, Indian MPs were on the cusp of becoming people who you needed to access through formal channels. Many of the places that they went on official business were closed to the public. They spent limited time at their offices because they did not need to be there. I probably could have adopted the just-show-up strategy and had about the same amount of success. I doubt that is true now.
At the planning stage of your fieldwork, consider the risk of low elite response rates even in countries that were very amenable to research a few decades ago. Remember that archives are an option when you are studying elites (see also chapter 17 by Lindsey O’Rourke for more on this topic). Using archives may mean switching your focus to less recent events, but the improvement in data quality may be worth it. Also, check the archives even if you are dealing with a government that is known for secrecy. Some of the things I found in India’s archives were probably not supposed to be declassified but slipped through when parts of the bureaucracy were merged or moved offices.
Be on the lookout for anything that will strand people with nothing better to do than talk to you. I had some of my best interview days during power failures, floods, and general strikes. Hopefully, you will have a phone to play with while you wait, preferably one with a video chat option.
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Bethany Lacina is associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Lacina, Bethany. Rival Claims: Ethnic Violence and Territorial Autonomy Under Indian Federalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
• ——. “How Governments Shape the Risk of Civil Violence: India’s Federal Reorganization, 1950–56,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 3 (2014): 720–38.
• ——. “India’s Stabilizing Segment States,” Ethnopolitics 13, no. 1 (2014): 13–27.
NOTES
1. Excellent pieces on interviewing political elites include Richard F. Fenno, “Observation, Context, and Sequence in the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 1 (March 1986): 3–15, https://doi.org/10.2307/1957081; Sharon Werning Rivera, Polina M. Kozyreva, and Eduard G. Sarovskii, “Interviewing Political Elites: Lessons from Russia,” PS: Political Science & Politics 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 683–88, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096502001178; and appendix of Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, by Séverine Autesserre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2. Richard F. Fenno, Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (New York: Little, Brown, 1978).