A method where ordinary citizens are trained to carry out surveys or interviews as part of a citizen dialogue. This can be the main dialogue method or part of a larger process.
Citizens can carry out many different types of interviews and surveys. It can apply to people’s general opinions about the municipality’s or region’s services and activities or information about their own experiences and behaviour. The interviews can also collect opinions on specific proposals. It can be both interviews with individuals or group interviews (for example, focus groups).
Citizens as interviewers can also play a role in designing research methods, determining questions and analyzing the results. Citizen interviewers can also be important because their participation signals that dialogues are carried out in a locally rooted way. Traditionally, the interviews have taken place face-to-face, but it is also possible to conduct it digitally or over the phone.
Many municipalities and regions experience that they receive a low response rate from certain groups when employees or hired consultants conduct interviews. There are also topics that are sensitive in certain groups and where the answers to surveys and interviews can be biased or dishonest. A group that many municipalities and regions find difficult to reach with surveys is young people.
Community researchers are one way to solve the challenge of uneven response rates. Having people who are themselves part of a certain group (and who have great insight into the group) be the ones to go out and interact can be a good way to increase response rates and can provide more honest answers.
Community researchers are trained to go out to the target group and conduct interviews of various kinds (alternatively through telephone interviews). It can be a handful being trained or a larger group. It is important to recruit interviewers who will easily reach the intended target group. Young people generally find it easier to reach other young people, but additional aspects such as gender, age, ethnicity, social background and other factors may be important to take into account in order to get the most honest answers possible. It is important to have the target group clear when the process begins.
The interviewees can be recruited as summer workers, as part of an internship, a labor market policy measure, by training members of associations and groups or through an open invitation.
The goal of community research is for them as a relatively small group to go out and get many more voices into the dialogue.
It is important that the citizens who are to conduct interviews receive training and support in their role. It can take time to learn the interview technique but also to build up confidence. It is important that staff are available to help, support and check that the interviews are going correctly. Quality control is important, and the process should be evaluated continuously.
The actual interviews that the citizen interviewers conduct often go quickly, but it is important to plan several months in advance to recruit and train the interviewers. It is also important to allow time to determine the questions and method and to allow sufficient time to analyze the results. If the interviews are to take place in several languages, it becomes extra important to create time for this.