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Targeting business elites in India

In a study of the ‘business elite’ in India (senior executives living very comfortably, travelling widely, consuming luxury goods and services and making important business purchases for their companies), many sampling challenges were faced. Though the number of participants surveyed was relatively high, researchers recognised that their work should be considered a pilot and that much more work was needed to generate a complete sampling frame. For their study, a systematic random sample was drawn from a ‘cleaned-up’ database of companies. In an initial telephone screening exercise, they targeted 1,714 companies and made successful contact with 859 of them (50.1%). They asked each of these companies: (1) who the most senior person in the company in that city was; (2) whether the company employed heads of a pre-defined list of other functions; and (3) what the contact details were for the most senior person and a randomly selected other function. Job functions were those core to the decision-making process and included: chief executive (most senior person); deputy chief executive/managing director (second-most senior person); head of finance; head of international/domestic sales; head of marketing and communications; head of production management/ operations; head of information technology. From the interviews, they estimated that the universe of eligible business executives in qualifying companies across eight Indian cities totalled 106,307. This was based on the incidence, at each of the companies sampled, of a randomly generated list of job functions. They also pinpointed 1,499 executives they wanted to contact, of whom 600 (40%) agreed to be interviewed face to face.