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Real
People
INTERVIEWING
REAL PEOPLE IS CRUCIAL TO YOUR LEARNING AND YOUR GRADE.
Websites and publications can
be excellent sources of information for your policy analysis if they
are used with care and good sense.
However, since anyone with access to a computer can put
anything they want on the Internet, you are more likely to encounter
garbage than you are good information.
So, you must be even more careful in using information from the
Internet than using printed information.
Furthermore, to conduct
acceptable policy analysis, you have to spend part of your time
talking to people who are in a position to actually know something
about the subject you are studying. Only direct contact with players,
stakeholders and experts can put you on the right path and help you
avoid countless hours of chasing information or developing a public
policy proposal that is so trivial or so illogical as to demonstrate
that you do not understand your subject.
Of course, no matter how high
a person's status or how impressive their credentials and
background, you should never take what they say as gospel.
They have their own viewpoints and interests, and you need to
know where they are coming from. The best way to do that is to
interview several different people to see where there is agreement and
disagreement.
Interviewing players,
stakeholders and experts will help you write better papers, and become
more knowledgeable about public policy.
If the benefits are not enough
to motivate you, you should be aware of the costs of not working with
real people. You WILL lose 55 points in the following ways:
Failure to complete 4.1 and
4.3 in Module 2, which require actual contact, will cost you 5 and 10 points
respectively. TOTAL LOST:
15 points
Failure to cite a player,
stakeholder or expert contact in Exercises 5.2 and 5.3 in Module 3 will cost you 7 points each. TOTAL
LOST: 14 points
Failure to contact player in
6.2 (Module 3) will cost you 6 points.
TOTAL LOST: 6 points
Failure to cite a player in
Exercise 9.3 will cost you 10 points and 10.3 will cost you 10 points. TOTAL LOST:
20
points
You might decide that this is
"only" 55 points out of 650.
Admittedly, you could still eke out an "A" assuming that
you lose no more than an average 4 other points per module (something
no one has ever done in the history of the course going back to 1976).
For those of you not working for an "A," the 55 lost points will
even have a bigger impact.
You will also be able to WRITE
THE ANSWERS TO THE FOLLOWING EXERCISES FASTER AND BETTER if you have
and use real people contacts: 1.4, 3.1, 4.2, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2,5.3,5.4,
5.5, 6.2,6.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1, 10.3,
10.4.
THE SUREST PATH TO AN
�A� AND BEING A GOOD PUBLIC POLICY ANALYST IS TALKING WITH REAL PEOPLE.
Four
Easy Steps to Involving Real People in Your Work
1. Choose
your topic and your contacts carefully by being knowledgeable and
interested, and by using your family, friends and other contacts,
especially developing out of your community service. This is tricky because on the one hand you
want to choose a societal problem that interests you, and on the other
hand you want to have a strategy for finding contacts who are players,
stakeholders, or experts. The only strategy
is to balance the two. Being knowledgeable and interested is crucial
because you will be talking to people who are very knowledgeable and
very interested in the subject. While
you can apologize at the beginning for your lack of in-depth
knowledge, you should not show yourself to be clueless. Use people you
already know to suggest someone and put in a good word for you. You
might start with your parent�s friend who knows someone that will
help. You will be surprised how small the world really is. Your state
and federal legislative representatives will have staff who can be
interviewed or will help you get in touch if you have no personal
contacts. You may want to also try the email links on web sites of
organizations concerned with your topic.
In addition, look through the Yellow Books in the TA Bay for
contacts, and remember to get in touch with an even balance of
players, not just one side of your societal problem.
It can be very helpful to find a governmental unit and then ask
yourself who influences that group.
Also keep in mind the cascading effect�once you reach one of
these players, they will be able to direct you to other experts and
help you gain even more information.
In searching for your contact: First identify the governmental
departments. Next,
remember your geographic level. Then look at elected
officials as contacts. Keep in mind that Interest
groups are also great resources. Another path, that some of you
may be able to follow, is to use your community service interaction to
contact the leaders of the organization. Go to http://www.state.ny.us
for Onondaga County or City of Syracuse to find leads on department
heads. Finally and the best strategy of all, choose a community
service where stakeholders and/or players that are relevant to your
societal problem are located. For example, working in a youth
center can help you with topics like education, teenage pregnancy,
obesity, youth crimes and violence and even health issues.
2.
Make
the initial contact by using the most convenient form of communication.
Email is best, telephone is next best, fax is next best,
face-to-face conversation is next best and the mail is hopeless
(unless your contact is mailing you lots of stuff). The reasons for
this ranking should be obvious. Email
does not require that both you and your contact be connected at the
same time. Neither does
fax nor mail. Fax is okay
because if the contact says, �I will fax you by 12 tomorrow,� you
can begin to bug them if they do not meet the deadline.
Mail is the worst because the contact can always say the stuff
is in the mail, and it will take you a week to find out if he or she
is a liar. By that time,
you will be well on your way to losing points. Telephone is preferred
to face-to-face because face-to-face requires that both of you have to
be physically in the same place at the same time.
3. Establish
a
bond with the person by following the rules of Dale Carnegie, whose
world famous book, How To Win
Friends and Influence People, will help you in this course and in
life. Page
206 of How You Can Help gives you four of his principles.
Add to them the idea that you need to convince contacts that it
is in their interest to talk
to you. Before you get
discouraged, remember you will be talking to people who are affected
by the problem you are studying. They
will see you as a potential convert. Appeal to their desire to convert
you, but maintain your own independence. Also, be knowledgeable, which
means finding and reading all you can on the subject. Don�t make the
person think, �This student is trying to get me to do his homework
because he is clueless.� Showing a genuine interest and concern and
demonstrating knowledge will prevent such negative thoughts.
4. Set
up a procedure to have continuous dialogue.
Here is where email or telephone contact with the individual
becomes valuable. Promise
contacts that you will not bother them more than twice the rest of the
semester. Encourage them
to mail or email, or identify a website or other sources that will
keep you from becoming a pest. If
you follow the three guidelines provided above, you might be able to
develop some key questions that will make your dialogue efficient and
help you write your A-quality paper.
QUICK
GUIDE OF QUESTIONS YOU WANT TO ASK REAL PEOPLE for Exercises
4.3,5.2,5.3,9.3, and 10.3.
You
may not be able to get all these questions in the first time you talk
to the real people, but keep these in mind and try. This will allow
you the option of not going back to the individual in the future.
You don�t have to use the exact wording below but these are
the questions you will need answered.
From
4.3
Contact the player or
expert you listed in Exercise 4.1. Engage in a meaningful
correspondence, asking them questions that will help you understand
your societal problem (i.e. how they impact the issue, policies that
improve the problem, etc.) Briefly summarize your conversation,
including three of the questions you asked and the
player�s/expert�s responses to those questions. Include the date(s)
of contact.
From
5.2
Can you provide
either an example or a statistic of the existence of the societal
problem?
From 5.3
What factors
do you think are most important in contributing to the societal
problem? (You can use the word �cause� here but remember some
people might say you can never know the cause.)
From
6.2b - Player, stakeholder or expert
What policy or
policies do you think would help to reduce the societal problem?
From
9.3 - Player, stakeholder or expert
What players would
support or oppose my policy? (Remember, you are trying to get issue
position, power and priority out of the interviewee but don�t use
those terms.)
From 10.3 - Player, stakeholder or
expert
How do you think one
or more of the players would react to a strategy of____?
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