Plan more time than you think you need between interviews

If you ever find yourself in São Paulo conducting interviews in varied locations, plan at least 90 minutes between interviews to navigate traffic. Similarly, if you are conducting a lab study, I also recommend planning extra time between sessions to account for participants who are running late because of traffic. In 2013, CNN published an article⁵ noting that São Paulo is the “seventh most congested city in the world.” It didn’t take long for us to understand just how bad it was. On one occasion Google Maps informed us that it would normally take 22 minutes to get to our next interview, but in current traffic it would take over an hour. Unexpectedly, this was one of the most important takeaways from the trip because it helped us understand why locals are so motivated to find homes near the subway.

Over-recruit in anticipation of no-shows

Owing to heavy traffic congestion and a generally laid-back culture, participants cancelling interviews or starting very late is not uncommon. We had a couple of last minute cancellations that we struggled to fill until the very end. It would have been a major missed opportunity to not reach our quota after spending so much time, energy and money to travel to Brazil and plan for the research. For these reasons you need to over-recruit your study. Plan to tack on an extra couple of participants for every 10 whom you would normally recruit and be prepared to go with the flow. Trust me, it’s worth the expense to have that security. My colleague avoided this problem during his research in Brazil by setting aside a half-day at the end of the study that he could fill with people who needed to reschedule. Below are additional tips about recruiting:

Incentives

When recruiting, you will want to encourage candidates to participate with some sort of compensation. Our research partner explained in some cases this could be a bottle of high-quality liquor. For our study we used $190 USD as the incentive. If you go the cash route, you will want to make sure the amount reflects both the duration and location of the interview. Our interviews were 90 minutes each, so a 60-minute interview might be $125 USD. Similarly, it would be appropriate to compensate participants more for in-home research rather than lab research because they are allowing you and your colleagues to visit their homes.

Class structure

Brazil is different from the U.S. in that they have a well-defined and widely understood class structure based on income level⁶. Levels range from A (the super rich) to E (the very poor). Don’t be afraid to ask candidates what class level they fall into when you’re recruiting. We were looking for a mix in class levels, yet wanted to focus on those who would likely search for homes online; thus we recruited participants from A, B and C level classes. When you’re in Brazil, the class structure will become clearer when you see extremely low-income communities side-by-side with the super rich, especially in urban areas. Note: it may be easier to recruit participants in A, B and C classes since it is more likely that they have a phone where you can reach them.