Qualitative Research

In this article I discuss my experiences conducting fieldwork in Nicaragua over two summers as a starting point for thinking about a feminist methodology of encounters. A feminist methodology of encounters directs our attention to the ways in which research work consists of multiple, fragmented and complex encounters between experiencing subjects. In this article I suggest that a feminist methodology of encounters provides pedagogical insight into how researchers can be situated ‘between’ participants and sites of research. In particular, in my research it is not only an examination of ‘betweenness’ in that I am looking to the everyday uncertainties of encounters, but also that my work often became situated as ‘between’ hosts and volunteers. The problematic is to attend to the ways in which encounters are never fully accomplished or predetermined, but also that they happen between actors, as did both my research and the process of researching. This methodology attends to the important political dimensions of this ‘betweenness’.

Amidst a winter snow storm we drove slowly and carefully to our research site. Leaving much earlier than usual we wanted to be there to greet the indigenous youth who we had come to know in the process of inquiring into their ongoing identity making. We came to know them over several months in a junior high school arts club and had developed relationships with them that were marked by care. In attending to care, Noddings (1984) offered us a way to think about ethics. Yet Noddings did not explicitly turn her attention to an ethics for research, rather her focus was on an ethics of care in moral education. Drawing on our work alongside indigenous youth we show how these four components of an ethics of care shaped our narrative inquiry and show how a relational ethics builds on, and extends, an ethics of care in narrative inquiry.

Social scientists are increasingly attentive to the practical importance of research ethics and professional codes of conduct when undertaking studies with human participants, especially around sensitive topics. In New Zealand, the social and cultural context of research praxis is also shaped by institutional principles that ensure research participants feel safe, respected, and heard when participating in research, and that the knowledge outcomes of the research process will be disseminated and shared with relevant cultural groups. In this article, we present four case studies based on projects that discuss researcher positionality in relation to the ethical and emotional work involved in undertaking research on sensitive topics with individuals from vulnerable and marginal groups. In doing so, we foreground the importance of articulating and managing emotion in research on sensitive topics, and suggest measures to ensure the well-being of researchers engaged in studies of this kind.

In this article, we argue that research ethics in the doing of oral history research are inadequately addressed in the existing body of research. Although oral history researchers have paid considerable attention to procedural ethical issues, there is currently a lack of attention on situational research ethics in the doing of oral history. We address particular ethical challenges that we experienced while reconstructing the history of three remaining orphanages after the Second World War in the city of Ghent (a city in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) by drawing on oral history research from former orphans and ex-staff members. Their rather surprising, yet pertinent, questions enabled us to discover the political nature of research ethics, and prompted us to engage in ‘going public’. We discuss the complexities of our attempt to provide a ‘questionable’ historical interpretation for the ambiguous history of these childhood institutions in the recent past.

Negotiating access to participants presents challenges for researchers of organised crime. Issues in accessing the field of criminal organisations in Western settings have been well-documented. However, strategies for accessing Chinese criminal organisations remain embryonic. This article presents findings that represent the researcher’s first-hand fieldwork experiences in overcoming such challenges, especially the problem of access negotiation when conducting triad society research. As the first ethnographic study of triad society in China, this paper aims to identify the ways in which the effective use of Chinese culture and triad subculture, insider information and knowledge facilitates access negotiation to the field, and helps establish social networks with individuals at different levels of the triad hierarchy. Attention is paid to the ways in which the researcher utilised Chinese networking culture, including guanxi principles and the mechanism of renqing as well as face culture and face-work, in gaining access to and building trust with triad members. Techniques to acquire triad subculture will also be addressed.

The purpose of this article is to present an arts-based method for collaborative research underpinned by the performative turn in ethnography (Denzin, 2003). The article presents the ‘metaxic method’, building on the term metaxis invented by Boal (1995) whereby individuals feel ‘belonging completely and simultaneously to two different, autonomous worlds’ (1995: 43). Before bringing participants into a research engagement using the metaxic method there is preparation work for the research team to do. We present a process derived from Augusto Boal’s ‘Cop in the Head’ theatre game where the ‘play’ is periodically interrupted to seek insight and critical reflection. This research team preparation process is performative and playful, using role to bring alive the frame of performative research in pursuit of surfacing epistemological assumptions. In doing so, researchers have had a prequalitative fieldwork opportunity to experience difference together. It is at this point that the metaxic method can be introduced. This experience is a critical mirroring of theoretical/political commitments and an opportunity, through having a partial experience of ‘other’ to consider the potential collective and community dimensions possible through research.

This article demonstrates the significance of engaging with whiteness as a key dimension of difference shaping research in multi-faceted ways. I critically reflect on a research project that included interviews with Muslim men in Rotherham, a northern English town that had experienced a child sexual exploitation crisis involving Pakistani Muslim men. It raised significant methodological and epistemological issues regarding my position in the research, as a white female researcher, and my relationships with local Pakistani Muslim men and women. I highlight the fluidity of my insider–outsider position through exploring political and ethical dilemmas involved in carrying out the research and structural and experiential aspects of researcher subjectivity. I show how being white both facilitated and obstructed the research as I steered my way through a highly sensitive set of circumstances and how engaging with whiteness is key in democratising research and shedding light on unequal power relations in knowledge production.