Policy Careers: Call for Participants

Thank you for your interest in participating in this study about the career trajectories of policy professionals. The aim of the study is to understand how different personal, financial, moral and political factors shape the career trajectories of policy professionals. It seeks participants who live and work, or are seeking to live and work, in the Washington, D.C. metro area, in a policy-relevant capacity. This includes individuals employed or potentially employed by government, law firms, lobbying firms, consulting firms, PR firms, think tanks, research firms, political advocacy groups, trade associations, nonprofits, and any other organizations that seek to influence, support, research, or implement public policies.

To participate, please click the button below to fill out a pre-interview interest form.

Page Contents
1. Overview
2. Participation and Interview Process
3. Attribution, Confidentiality, and Data Management

What motivates someone to go into public policy? What challenges, opportunities, and political shifts do they encounter over the course of their professional life, and how do these factors shape career decisions and trajectories? As a participant in this study, your experiences will help shed light on these questions, and advance sociological research on political life, public service, occupations, work, policymaking, and democracy. In addition to these academic insights, this research is also partly motivated by personal experience. Before academia, I started my own career in public policy at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, passionate about diplomacy and global economic development. At USTR, I met government officials, policy analysts, attorneys, lobbyists, and other professionals, and realized my colleagues all had complex career paths that led them to where they are now. We came to the city with specific ideas about ourselves and the impact we wanted to make, and subsequently encountered periods of alienation, changing ambitions, political events, and developments in our personal lives, that led us on different paths than the one we originally imagined. These experiences inform how we conduct our work. Understanding how individuals navigate their careers will be critical to understanding how policies get made, who gets to participate in public life, and how to improve the policymaking process.

This study is part of my dissertation research in the UW-Madison Department of Sociology. It has been approved by the UW-Madison Institutional Review Board (Study ID 2021-0657). To participate in this study, please fill out the pre-interview questionnaire. I will follow up with you to schedule an interview via your preferred mode of contact. Published outcomes of this study include a series of research articles, as well as a book that follows policy professionals through their careers.

I am seeking participants in this study who live and work, or are seeking to work, in Washington, D.C. in a policy-relevant capacity. This includes individuals employed or potentially employed by government (any branch), private law/lobbying/consulting/PR/research firms, think tanks, political advocacy groups, trade associations, nonprofits, and any other organizations that seek to influence, support, research, or implement public policies. Individuals at all career stages are welcome, and I will attempt to maintain an even distribution of participants of different ages and career stages. To participate, you should have already finished undergraduate education. You are still welcome to participate if you haven’t yet held a full-time policy job, but are seeking one.

This study will proceed in phases, and will be conducted according to your own comfort level and availability. All participants will be asked to sit down for an initial interview, which should last 1 to 1.5 hours. Before this interview, I’ll ask you to fill out a brief form with some basic information about your education, work experiences, and current employment. During the interview, we’ll go through some of these experiences chronologically, in a loosely structured, conversational format. I’ll ask you to reflect on your influences and ambitions, what choices or options were available to you at a certain point in time, how you evaluated these options based on your own personal views and those around you, and how you learned and changed from these career decisions.

I’ll contact you to ask whether you’d be able to sit for a follow-up interview. We’ll discuss many of the same topics, so that I can get a fuller understanding of your perspective. We’ll also discuss career goals, and how your current goals may have changed from your initial expectations at the start of your policy career.

These two interviews, if possible, will be conducted in person, at a location of your choice. I suggest a location where you would be comfortable discussing both personal and professional topics. While some are comfortable in public areas such as coffee shops or restaurants, others may prefer a private space such as an office or a conference room. I am happy to provide a private space as well. I am fully vaccinated and can provide whatever level of PPE you prefer. If an in-person meeting is not feasible, we can also conduct interviews over Zoom.

After these two interviews, we can proceed according to your own schedule and career shifts. I am open to regular communication, either through in-person meetings, Zoom calls, phone calls, emails, or text messages. As part of my book project, I will be looking to follow certain participants more closely, to build details and narratives that will create a more encompassing story about life and work in D.C. If you are comfortable with sharing day-to-day reflections and details about your life, what you share with me will go far to help realize the book project.

All participants will have the option to specify their level of anonymity and confidentiality. Most participants will be identified by a pseudonym in my work. Employers and educational institutions can also be represented by pseudonyms or generalizations (e.g. if you went to UW-Madison and worked at USTR, I could describe them as a “large Midwestern university” and a “trade-related federal agency”).

You also have the option of specifying, before you reveal any information to me, the level of attribution attached to that information. Adhering to standard journalistic practices, you can specify whether something is:

• On the record: you may be quoted directly, and you will be identified by name

• On background: you may be quoted directly, but you will be identified by a pseudonym and/or generic titles that retain relevance for research purposes, but address concerns with identifiability. For example, quotes might be attributed to: "U.S. public official" "lobbyist for an agricultural trade association" "program manager at a conservative think tank"

• On deep background: you will not be quoted, but the information you provide may be paraphrased in publications, decontextualized and stripped of possible source identification.

• Off the record: the information you provide will not be quoted, paraphrased, or referenced to in any way whatsoever. The information may serve as context or as a lead for other research inquiries.

During the interviews, I will audio record our conversation and take basic notes by hand. The audio files will be saved in a password-protected folder that only the study team (myself, my advisor, and my research assistant(s)) will be able to access. The handwritten notes will mainly be used for recall during the interview. They will not be digitized in any way, and the physical notebooks will be stored in a secure container in my office. Transcripts of the audio files will be made to ensure accuracy of the information relayed in the interview. These transcripts will also be saved in a password-protected folder only accessible to the study team.

Aside from direct electronic communications between you and me (e.g. email, text message), and the initial form with your basic information, none of the records of the interview will contain your name or other identifiable information. You will be assigned either an ID code or identified by your pseudonym in all files. I will maintain a document separate from the audio files and transcriptions, saved in a separate a password-protected folder, that matches your name with your pseudonym and ID code. This file will be destroyed after the completion of the project.