Gender Identity and Research Relationships: Volume 14

To demonstrate why leaving the ethnographic field provides an excellent opportunity for the researcher to engage in reflexivity on all aspects of the research and especially on issues of power, age and gender.

An autobiographical reflection on a 40 year career as an ethnographer.

The autobiographical literature and the methods literature on ethnography has neglected leaving the field, and the opportunities that process provides for reflectivity. The author reflects on issues of power, age and gender as they have been implicated in the various fieldsites studied in her career. The particular field site featured centrally is two martial arts, savate and capoeira.

To improve the quality of reflexive writing on leaving the field.

To reflect on the central role of gender and age in qualitative research practice, particularly in regard to how the gender and age of the researcher influence fieldwork interactions.

A reflection of three separate qualitative research undertakings, all of which made use of interviews and participant-observation fieldwork.

Gender and age intersections of both the researcher and research subjects influence fieldwork interactions both in terms of discursive and embodied interactions. Reflections on past research involve considering the relative changing subject position of the researcher in terms of masculinity, youth and social status. Rapport is established in the field through talk and interaction that can involve the performance of knowledge and gender. The researcher’s embodied feeling of ‘fitting in’ during fieldwork therefore draws on gender-, age- and ethnicity-specific privilege.

Unlike many acts of researcher reflexivity which reflect on a single research project, this chapter recalls experiences of fieldwork during three separate research undertakings. It adds to debates about methodological issues of doing research into men and masculinities by exploring how such is intersected by the age of both the researcher and research participants.

To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

To consider how knowledge about social class is produced in research and how it can become obscured from view through certain empathic practices of representation.

A number of data extracts, generated through participant observation and focus group interviews, are reflexively (re)considered in the chapter. These are drawn from an ethnographic study, previously undertaken by the author with a class of 25 young women in one private, selective girls’ school in the United Kingdom.

Social class was found to be silenced in the accounts which resulted from the research. This relative neglect is considered to have resulted from the primacy given to gender in a feminist project; to an over-emphasised sense of empathy and due to the desire to build and maintain respect and rapport. Strategies of empathic identification and representation should not be evaded altogether, but they need to be carefully considered (how and why are they used and to what effect?) and not taken up too readily, so that researchers don’t inadvertently re-inscribe the inequalities they are seeking to eliminate.

The chapter argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the class-making practices which researchers and participants engage in during and after fieldwork. Social class is brought to the foreground in the analyses presented.

This chapter reflects on the process of conducting qualitative research as an indigenous researcher, drawing from two studies based in south Wales (the United Kingdom). The chapter not only explores the advantages of similarity in relation to trust, access, gender and understandings of locality, but it also complicates this position by examining the problem of familiarity.

The studies, one doctoral research and one an undergraduate dissertation project, both took a qualitative approach and introduced visual methods of data production including collages, maps, photographs and timelines. These activities were followed by individual elicitation interviews.

The chapter argues that the insider outsider binary is unable capture the complexity of research relationships; however, these distinctions remain central in challenging the researcher’s preconceptions and the propensity for their research to be clouded by their subjective assumptions of class, gender, locality and community.

The chapter presents strategies to fight familiarity in fieldwork and considers the ethical issues that arise when research is conducted from the competing perspectives of both insider and academic. The authors focus on uncertainties and reservations in the fieldwork process and move beyond notions of fighting familiarity to consider the unforeseen circumstances of acquaintance and novel positionings within established social networks.

To outline the kinds of problems and dilemmas which researchers might experience in professional sports settings and to highlight the way in which gender might shape those experiences.

An ethnography of professional football.

Few social researchers have managed to breach the institutional bounds of professional sport and fewer still have carried out ethnographic work within this context. Gender inevitably impacts the complexion of sporting domains and this manifests itself in everyday behaviours and sub-cultural practices. Qualitative research has the potential to uncover the nuances of individual and collective behaviours within such settings and to shed light upon the ways in which gender relations shape the contours of institutional life.

To situate current debate around methods within wider discussions of gender and social research and against the backdrop of theoretical shifts in the conceptualisation of masculinities.

To reflect upon access, rapport and representation in ethnographic research through the lens of ‘place’, especially how place intersects with gender.

This chapter uses a critical, reflexive analysis of my own ethnographic research.

I argue that place – defined as the set of meanings surrounding a geographical location – is an important, but less understood factor that shapes the research process. Place interacts with more commonly identified categories such as race, class and gender, but cannot be reduced to them.

While place is a burgeoning topic of scholarship, little work has considered how it influences qualitative data collection and analysis. This chapter fills this gap and in the process illuminates how more recognised categories such as gender are situated in place.

To understand how research-participant relationships are formed in research settings through experiences and analyses of content-specific gendered identity practices.

I draw upon a school-based ethnographically informed study exploring the construction of masculinities among white working-class boys in three schools in South London, United Kingdom between 2009 and 2011. To access participants’ perceptions, I used a methodology of observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and visual methods.

Themes of gendered embodiment, physicality and performance play a part in the formation of relationships in this study. Furthermore, such themes play a role – to varying degrees – in researcher-participant relationship-building. In understanding relationship-building practices, I make connections to my own reflexivity accounting for the multifaceted nature of identities, lifestyles and perspectives present in researcher-participant interaction.

Throughout the fieldwork, constructs of gender, nationality and class all contributed to how relationships were built. In navigating the power relations innate to all relationship-building, I discuss how I capitalised on my outsider status in terms of nationality to neutralise certain elements of class and gender that were normative to my participants, but, simultaneously, draw upon my insider status in terms of knowledge of the locale, humour and clothing which contributed greatly to how the relationships were constructed and maintained.

To explore the intersecting dynamics of gender, ethnicity, age, safety, power and sexuality in two cases of qualitative research

Reflexive analysis of community participatory action research.

Being an ‘insider’ is a nuanced and complex identity in social research leading to power flows that are not unidirectional. In addition, not only is gender not the only difference that makes a difference, but it is also important to consider the importance of difference within ‘sameness’.

In considering intersecting identities, difference and sameness this chapter adds to the assertion that research is never ‘hygienic’ and the role of self and research participants are vital considerations at all stages from design to dissemination.

To reflects upon gender, research relationships and ‘elite’ participants and highlight how traditional use of labels for gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as other aspects of identity, often serve to restrict a fuller picture as well as some more fluid queer realities.

This chapter uses queer and feminist theories to explore the relationships when the researcher and participants belong to a shared peer group of sex education professionals. It examines the choice to avoid pronoun usage or collection of demographic data, gendered or otherwise, and reflexively contemplates the impact and practicalities of friendship relationships within the research context.

I suggest that tensions often exist between feminist and queer methodologies and this chapter offers reflections for navigating and reconciling these tensions, opening up new possibilities for respectful and nuanced participant representation within research findings.

This chapter serves to further develop what it might mean to have a queer and feminist methodological approach to research, and specifically explores the application of such a framework when considering practices of collecting participant demographic data, classifying participants as ‘elites’ and reflecting upon friendships with participants.