The Key Informant Technique: A Nonethnographic Application

formants were selected for a particular phase of the research (that of identifying the poorest and wealthiest communities of the county) with the hope that from detailed presentation of a specific case, some general principles of use can be drawn. In this article we shall define what we mean by the technique, and then analyze its use in gathering data. This will be followed by a section on the kinds of data we hoped to discover through the use of the technique. Our research design will then be outlined and the reasons for deviating from the original design will be explored. Finally, the manner in which the operation was carried out will be described. The procedures for the analysis of the data as well as the results are not pertinent to this paper and are therefore omitted from it, but they can be found elsewhere (Tremblay 1955). THE KEY INFORMANT TECHNIQUE 1. Definition of terms. As used here, the term "key informant" has a more delimited definition than is usual. In traditional anthropological field research, key informants are used primarily as a source of information on a variety of topics, such as kinship and family organization, economic system, political structure, and religious beliefs and practices. In brief, they are interviewed intensively over an extensive period of time for the purpose of providing a relatively complete ethnographical description of the social and cultural patterns of their group. In that particular fashion, a few informants are interviewed3 with the aim of securing the total patterning of a culture. The technique is preeminently suited to the gathering of the kinds of qualitative and descriptive data that are difficult or time-consuming to unearth through structured datagathering techniques such as questionnaire surveys.