The research fell into three parts. First, there were pilot interviews with 41 full-time officers carried out between August and December 1985. Second, there was observation work, conducted between January 1986 and January 1987, and finally there was questionnaire distribution, covering the period January 1986—October 1987 with a follow-up in Summer 1991. The pilot interviews were unstructured as their principal purpose was to familiarize us with the work of the full-time officers. The interviews proved to be particularly illuminating and the local officers in the unions we contacted were extremely helpful. We therefore used the interviews as an occasion to negotiate access for the observation stage of our research. We did speak to some shop stewards, but only on an informal and ad hoc basis, because it soon became clear that selecting a representative sample of stewards who worked with our target officials would be an enormous and complicated undertaking. Our target officials serviced an average of 66 separate bargaining units, containing anywhere from one to 50 shop stewards. Although a separate study of shop steward perceptions of union officials would have been desirable, we decided to rest content with our observation of officer-steward interactions in the meetings we attended.

Our observation work focused on 27 officers (the original plan was ‘25–30’) from four unions (rather than ‘2–3’).