A Reflective Analysis on Strategic Approaches Implemented in Accessing and Conducting Interviews with Elites in Sri Lanka

In this paper, I intend to share my experiences and reflections on the process of how the organisational elites, the gatekeepers and the participants of my study, were accessed and interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The three-fold objectives of this paper are: negotiating access, the strategic approaches implemented by me as the researcher in accessing and conducting interviews, and sharing my lessons with novice researchers, who work in similar contexts. In the discussion, an emphasis is placed on accessing and interviewing elites attached to national, provincial and school-level in Sri Lanka, by considering them as single-type elites and different groups of elites as introduced by Li (2021). The discussion is based on my experiences and supervisory records that I maintained during the data collection process.