I got a new job with NatCen, the National Center for Social Research...
The job is nothing particularly demanding, it's just as a field interviewer: basically I get allocated addresses and names and have to go interview people about a range of different social and political topics.
I first became aware of NatCen years ago because they conduct to annual British Social Attitudes Survey, which goes out to around 3000 individuals and involves an hour long interview on topics ranging from immigration to marriage, it varies year on year.
In surveys like that you're cold-calling after the interviewees have had an initial introduction letter and you have to convince them to take part, but NatCen also do longitudinal studies where the participants are generally onboard and know the drill.
They've started me off on one of these: the ELSA project, or English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. It's been going twenty years now and involves interviews and cognitive tests with the respondents, taking up to 2.5 hours in their homes if you're interviewing a couple.
To me, this just says tea and biscuits and a nice long chat with people mostly in their 60s and 70s, nice!
The pay is O.K. but not great...
You get paid per interview, and some money for travelling, and they've already paid for me to take a trip down to London for a training day, it works out around £13 an hour, which for this kind of low stress, no thought work it's perfect.
My sample is always gonna be within an hour's drive, for this first study I've got 4 addresses in my immediate postcode which means I can walk to them, longest is 50 minutes away, mileage allowance is pretty generous.
Free clipboard and pens.
Living the dream...
And it works around my blog work and voluntary work (which I can jiggle) really easily!
Nice little top-up income, keep that monkey off my back and buy me a few more doughnuts!
Also it's not a proper 'research' job, my Masters in social research is TOTALLY unnecessarily for this, in fact a degree isn't even required, but it's certainly not gonna hurt if I see a postgraduate level research job in the future and fancy applying for it.
Not actually started yet...
I've done the training, spoken to my field project manager quite a few times, got my bumph through for the first batch of interviews, but even though the training day was two weeks ago we only got the green light to start interviewing yesterday.
And I need to schedule a supervised first day of course, so that's gonna be as and when.
And I haven't been able to access my practice interview because of technical problems, but hey, ALL of this works in my favour: the organization seems pretty disorganized, so as long as I'm on the case and keep decent records, I'm gonna look relatively good!
TBH though I just want to get access to the systems I need, book some slots and get out there, I'm all about being paid £13 an hour to drive around the scenic Herefordshire countryside and have nice chats!
