Start the planning and visa application process early

Before the project officially landed we were already investigating applying for visas. The process comprises many steps (in my case, I needed to collect ten different pieces of documentation to prove that I was, in fact, planning to do business in Brazil). If you’re traveling to Brazil with a passport from North America, Asia, or Africa, you’re going to need to start the visa process³ right away.

We needed to rush order my visa, which set us back about $1,000 USD, because we were going to travel soon after the project started. For anybody who has a few weeks to wait to get a visa then feel free to mail it to a consulate. If you’re like me and need to rush order your visa, your application will need to be hand-delivered to a Brazilian embassy or consulate. This is likely inconvenient for most people because you won’t find embassies and consulates in every city. The good news is that there are a lot of companies out there that will deliver your paperwork for you.

Partner with a great local firm

We needed to find a research firm to help us moderate the interviews and we needed to find it fast. Within four days, we interviewed three companies via Skype to understand their processes, experience, and services. We knew a contact at one of the firms and found the other two through an Internet search. At the end of the interview process, we decided to partner with Insitum⁴, an innovation consulting company which we learned about through an existing contact. We chose them because they had extensive experience with ethnographic research and seemed thoroughly excited about working with us. The day after signing the contract they were already helping us with study planning.

Insitum exposed us to cultural nuances we needed to consider during the research and future design phases. We learned nearly as much from the Insitum team as we did from the research itself. On our way to interviews, they gave us background information on how the neighborhood we were visiting had evolved in recent years. This helped us better understand the perspective of the participants who we interviewed. For example, we interviewed a participant who lived in an area where crime had increased rapidly in the previous few months, so we understood why she was looking to move into a new apartment so quickly.

Hosting three to four strangers in your home is awkward, especially when you’re telling them about very personal things such as your dream home. Our research partners made participants feel at ease. They brought expertise to the table that we simply wouldn’t have been able to achieve by communicating with participants through a translator without a native moderator. I am confident that Insitum’s presence contributed to how open participants were with us, and helped us capture high-quality data.

Interviewing participants in their homes.

Remember that when selecting a research partner you’re not only looking for a team with expertise in gathering data, you also want to consider how they can help you synthesize and report the data. They are likely to catch themes you will not simply because they are more familiar with the culture. It is important to discuss the strategy for reporting data well in advance because what is considered standard to one party could be considered non-standard to another. Tip: The size of the research firm doesn’t matter. My colleagues who have conducted research in Brazil, Spain, Japan, Germany, India, and the UK all agree that even small and independent foreign firms produce very high-quality work.