Friendship in the Field: Ethics and Reflexivity in Auto/biographical Research

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore a model of researcher reflexivity, drawn from anthropological literature and applied to an auto/biographical study of young men in university. Social scientific research can involve significant revelation of self for research participants through data generation tools such as interviews, diaries, photographs and social media, and this can have an impact on researchers, who can often be sensitive to the type of material they are studying, and sometimes deeply affected by it. This paper comes out of life history research completed with participants who lived with the researcher, and with whom he developed a friendship. Auto/biographies were co-constructed across a series of themed, semi-structured life history interviews, supplemented with visual and written data generated by the research participants. The paper addresses issues of researcher reflexivity and ethics when friendship intrudes on research, and looks at a number of models for dealing with this, both in the field and in analysis stages. The paper draws examples from Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field, Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer, and Wolcott’s Sneaky Kid and its Aftermath: Ethics and Intimacy in Fieldwork. The models for ethics and reflexivity provided by these works is analysed and possible applications discussed.