Editor's note: Gavin Johnston is chief anthropologist for Two West, a Kansas City, Mo., design firm. This article appeared in the December 20, 2010, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

For the most part, people who design and conduct qualitative market research see recruiting as something that happens apart from the fieldwork instead of as part of the research process. It's my belief that research begins during recruitment, not after you are in the field.

Every so often, we have a client with such a short time frame or such a specific participant need that recruiters are necessary. We try to convince clients to give us the time to use our own staff to recruit on the ground or at the very least, through phone conversations. Even when using an outside recruiter, simply taking what you get is sloppy work.

We have found that most recruiting agencies draw from a pool of people who have signed up to participate in focus groups and who have already been "trained" to participate. This is becoming increasingly the case for ethnographic participants as well. While a good interviewer/participant observer can no doubt get around some of the problems of respondents telling them what they want to hear, not having access to the data generated while finding people to talk to (or letting them find you) is a severe limitation. It is important to remember that recruiters do not see data collection as their role. For a skilled ethnographer, for whom everything is data, this means that they lose potentially valuable information.

To be fair, using a recruiter is not always a bad idea. Indeed, there are some excellent recruiters whom we trust implicitly. They see themselves as partners with the ethnographer rather than simply playing a transactional role and can add to the insights that come from recruiting, but this caliber of recruiter is rare.

Establish trust and rapport

When we've used recruiters and our own on-the-ground recruits, the people we pick out are usually the more helpful respondents. Methodologically, we can establish trust and rapport during recruitment rather than relying on an awkward first encounter that was scheduled by someone else months in advance.

So, from the standpoint of doing what is best for the client, it raises a simple question: Shouldn't recruiting be a part of the process of the project and understanding the local context? The process of meeting and talking to people provides insight into cultural norms. Finding out whether or when they might talk with a researcher, let alone allowing the researcher into their lives on a more expansive basis, is an incredibly important source of information.

This isn't always an easy task, so remember the following tips:

Define the contexts. Where does an activity or practice take place? Defining the contexts we want to examine helps articulate the range of possibilities for observation.

Define the sample. Who are the people we want to talk with? What are the social and cultural circles that will shape the event? It isn't enough to define a demographic sample, you need to think in terms of cultural, social, professional and environmental systems.

Get dirty. Be willing and able to recognize potential participants while you are actually doing the work. Take advantage of the setting and use it to recruit.

Tell us volumes

Recruiting teaches us about daily life, respondent ideologies and what matters most to our participants. It can tell us volumes about how people conceptualize private and public spaces in which strangers are welcome to visit. Recruiting helps establish a sense of shared experience that can yield a richer understanding, which can in turn lead to greater innovation. Ethnography is grounded in the idea of becoming more than a stranger. Without being engaged firsthand in the recruitment process, the researcher is losing a profound opportunity.