The “Near Miss”: A Story of Relationship

Doing good qualitative research requires engaging with the ethical and epistemological challenges of deliberately entering into relationships with people to learn about them. The authors draw on an event in their personal lives for insight into research relationships, hoping to deepen their understanding of how these relationships feel and work from research participants’ perspectives. The authors present their experience in two linked vignettes to explore ways research participants might experience research about their experiences of loss, pain, shame, and social stigma and to address ways researchers can begin to understand how it feels to be the “written about” in research projects about such topics. They frame their discussion around three areas that arise from the vignettes: the increased risk to research participants when they like and trust researchers who misunderstand their experiences, the personal costs of disclosure, and the need for flexible research plans that can adapt to the interpersonal demands of intimate research relationships.