ArticleJournal of contemporary ethnography2015
Strategies for Obtaining Access to Secretive or Guarded Organizations.
Article in Journal of contemporary ethnography, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Organization-driven research: how anticipated reputational risk shapes organizational influence on knowledge production in sensitive organizational research.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Science, technology, security: Towards critical collaboration.Social studies of science · 2021Article
- The health impacts of extractive industry transnational corporations: a study of Rio Tinto in Australia and Southern Africa.Globalization and health · 2019Article
- Knowledge of practice: A multi-sited event ethnography of border security fairs in Europe and North America.Security dialogue · 2017Article
- Risk and Emotion Among Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Trials.Social psychology quarterly · 2016Article
- Feeding and Bleeding: The Institutional Banalization of Risk to Healthy Volunteers in Phase I Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.Science, technology & human values · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Establishing contacts and gaining permission to conduct ethnographic or qualitative research can be time-consuming and stressful processes. Gaining access can be especially challenging when representatives of prospective research sites see their work as being sensitive and would prefer to avoid outside scrutiny altogether. One result of this dynamic is that many organizations that exert a profound influence in governing populations and regulating individuals' access to basic needs are relatively invisible to the public and shielded from meaningful public accountability. Therefore, it is vital to effectively study secretive or guarded organizations and fill out the empirical record, which in turn could create the conditions for greater public awareness and debate. To that end, this paper draws on our collective research experience and the scholarship of others to present nine strategies that we have found to be especially effective for securing access to secretive organizations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.