Itinerant temporary migrant workers are often highly vulnerable to exploitation in employment, living arrangements, and citizenship rights more broadly. Documenting the nature and extent of the problems they experience is a necessary pre-condition to policy developments intended to overcome this vulnerability. Yet major hurdles exist to acquiring such information. Simply locating such workers is difficult, and costly when they are itinerant and geographically dispersed; language difficulties pose a further problem; their preference for not being identified by their employer for disclosing information can compound these barriers. In a recent study of young international backpackers performing harvesting work around Australia, these challenges were largely met using a variety of research methods, commencing with focus groups and them moving to an online survey. This paper provides an account of how these workers were accessed. As a first step, it was necessary to identify where they received information from and therefore how they could be informed about the study. The second step was to identify where they were located. Which product was ready to be picked? Where were harvesting jobs taking place? Combining information on these two steps led to the holding of focus groups in backpacker working hostels in regional locations, within a time-frame determined by the harvesting season. Information acquired through focus groups, in turn, highlighted the need to capture the working experience of harvesting workers across a geographical area too expansive to be practicable (on a time and cost basis) using only focus groups. An online survey was subsequently developed, based on the premise that a common characteristic amongst young international backpackers is their reliance upon emails and social media as a primary means of communication with friends and family as they travel without a fixed postal address to harvesting locations, often at short notice. The paper details how the availability of the online survey was communicated to harvesting workers; which communication methods worked, and which did not work; the incentives which were provided to harvesting workers to complete the survey; and finally the risks involved in providing an online survey to participants whose suitability to complete the survey cannot be confirmed before they have completed the survey. The paper concludes that whilst social media and electronic communication has made it easier to access itinerant workers, the research method has to accommodate the characteristics of the survey population in order to garner their participation.