3.1.2 RATIONALE BEHIND THE CHOICE OF TCG AND THE QUESTIONNAIRE

TCG has been chosen for the empirical study because it is a newly-evolved organisation without any defined communication policy that would help realise its aim of design and development. Since the researcher’s objective is to identify an effective communication policy, the freshness of TCG acts as a clean slate.

To facilitate the research findings, two sets of questionnaire have been used for two categories of respondents — the founding members of TCG as well as professionals from the development sector. The reason behind this was to gather empirical information on TCG as well as general information on the issue at hand.

The interviews were mostly conducted through emails because most of the respondents are busy professionals with schedules that entail frequent travelling. The advantage of using email as a mode of interview is that it can be accessed from any corner of the globe. This makes it less time and cost-intensive.

Besides this, Rob Aley has been interviewed telephonically and Angharad Thomas face-to-face. As an obvious drawback of a telephonic interview, Aley did deviate marginally from the questionnaire as soon as a rapport was established. But, because of his previous experience in working on design and development as well as his familiarity with the objectives of TCG, his response on a suitable communication policy for the Group was very insightful. Thomas, on the other hand, got very involved with the aims and objectives of the Group without contributing much to the research questions. As such, her responses helped largely in tracing the roots of TCG.

Other than the TCG members, valuable responses were received from well-placed professionals in the development sector, namely Tom Hewitt, Chirantani Dey and Ines Smyth. Hewitt is the director of the Child Rights Information Network (CRIN), a global network that disseminates information about children’s rights amongst NGOs, United Nations agencies, inter-governmental organisations (IGOs), educational institutions and other child rights experts (CRIN is hosted by Save the Children, UK, and also has support from Save Sweden, UNICEF and the Alliance); Smyth is the regional policy advisor for west and southern Africa, policy department, Oxfam, Great Britain; while Dey is a program officer (communication, documentation and advocacy) at UNDP, CHARCA (a joint United Nations project on reducing women's vulnerability to HIV/AIDS), India. Among the responses received, some of the points raised by Smyth could not be clarified because she was travelling and could not be contacted. As such, several disparities in her responses could not be analysed by the researcher.