qualitative

Trainee qualitative researchers, learning the most popular research method of interviewing, are routinely taught to use their interpersonal skills to create rapport with participants. This has been questioned for the last 20 years by Jean Duncombe and Julie Jessop. They ask, how ethical it is for researchers to fake friendship as a means to the end of gathering data?

On the one hand, it is common for people to use interpersonal skills to help us get what we want from others in our day-to-day lives. This applies whether we want a loan from a credit agency, a prescription from the doctor, a response to a complaint – in a multitude of situations, presenting our most polite and friendly selves can help to get the results we want. So it is arguable that it makes sense also to use these everyday methods in research.

On the other hand, research encounters are rather different from everyday encounters. This applies particularly to qualitative research where a researcher may spend a considerable period of time giving a participant their undivided attention. This is an unusual and often a welcome experience for participants, who often describe it in positive terms such as ‘therapeutic’, ‘cathartic’ or ‘a treat’.

Many of the people we want things from in day-to-day life are either providing us with goods and services, so that a transactional element is built into the encounter, or are already in a personal relationship with us through kinship, friendship or community membership. So the rapport we build in those situations already has a clear basis which is mutually understood. This does not apply within the research encounter, where we are usually asking participants to give us their time and information in exchange for a potential benefit to an imagined future population. (I considered the extent to which this is ethical in my recent post on the LSE Impact Blog.) Also, despite all the efforts to secure informed consent, we know that people generally agree to participate in research for their own reasons rather than ours. And where that reason is to get a little human company and kindness, which is lacking from their own lives, the practice of building rapport begins to appear even more suspect.

Imagine you are, let us say, living on minimal welfare benefits with a chronic condition which makes it difficult for you to leave the house. You have lost touch with the friends you used to have when you could go out to work, and your family live far away. You suffer from anxiety and you are very lonely. The carers who come in three times a day are brisk and professional; they don’t have time to chat, and you don’t want to hold them up because you know they are always under pressure. Then a researcher calls, saying she is doing an evaluation of the care you receive, and asking if she can visit you to ask a few questions. You are delighted because it’s been years since you had a visitor and she sounds so kind and friendly on the phone. When she visits, you tell her all sorts of things about yourself and your life. She seems really interested, and laughs at your jokes, and tells you a few things about her own life in return. You haven’t felt this good in years. When she has asked all her questions, you ask one of your own: please will she visit you again? She looks at the floor and says she would like to, but she can’t promise, because between work and her children she doesn’t have much free time. You would like to suggest she brings her children with her, but you know a ‘no’ when you hear one, so you let her go, wait for the front door to close, and listen to the emptiness of your home and your life.

Duncombe and Jessop point out that these problems are multiplied in longitudinal research, where the boundaries between real and faked friendship can become much more blurred. They share experiences of participants beginning to treat them as friends, and the discomfort that arises when they don’t reciprocate. I have had similar experiences, and I’m sure many other qualitative and mixed-methods researchers have too. It is interesting to consider this Euro-Western approach in the light of the very different Indigenous approach, in which research is deemed to be ethical when it serves to maintain and develop existing relationships. Looked at in this way, our Euro-Western approach of creating and then dropping relationships to further our research purposes seems potentially abusive.

The EU-funded TRUST project developed a Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings. It was based on four values elicited from research they did with a wide variety of people around the world: respect, fairness, honesty and care. The aim was to combat ‘ethics dumping’, where research deemed unethical in a higher-income country is conducted, instead, in a lower-income country where research is not governed by a regulatory system. I would argue that these values should also apply where research is done by a researcher with more social capital than some or all of their participants. In the vignette above, the researcher was not entirely honest and did not show care in response to the participant’s request, e.g. by signposting them to a local befriending service. This could be described as ‘friendship dumping’.

When you think about it, researchers using their interpersonal skills to create rapport with a participant as a means to an end is actually quite manipulative. This might be more defensible when we are ‘studying sideways’ or ‘studying up’, but even then it seems questionable. Showing respect for participants would be a more creditable aim, especially if it was combined with fairness, honesty and care.

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My new book on Qualitative Research for Quantitative Researchers was published last week. It came about in an odd kind of way. Some conversations online, mostly with members of the Women in Academia Support Network, plus various comments in client meetings, and a few things I’d read, coalesced in my head into an idea. Then it just so happened that I was at a meeting for the PRO-RES project, in London, in November 2019, and also present was Katie Metzler, a vice-president of SAGE Publishing. I had met Katie before and we had chatted on Twitter. While we were catching up over pre-meeting coffee, I told her of my idea. The next thing I knew, she had whipped out her phone and asked a commissioning editor to work with me on the book.

It was an interesting book to write, tracing a journey I had made myself – if I hadn’t, I don’t think I could have written the book. My first degree, a BSc in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s, was pure quantitative research. One of the things I most enjoyed was following reference trails down interesting paths in the library, and during one of these intellectual expeditions I found out about qualitative research. It fascinated me even then, and I asked if I could do a qualitative dissertation in my third year, but the answer was a resounding, rather shocked, and very firm ‘no’.

That seemed illogical to me, and slightly annoying, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t realise I had been caught up in the paradigm wars until I learned about them, much later, when I was doing an MSc in Social Research Methods in the early 2000s. The MSc covered both quant and qual methods, and you could specialise in either or both. It also taught social theory and the relationship of theory to research and research to practice. This time, my dissertation was qualitative, and I am still in touch with my wonderful dissertation supervisor Maggie O’Neill.

My PhD was mostly qualitative though I sneaked in a few bits of quant – my doctoral supervisors weren’t keen, but I have never seen the point of sticking to one or the other exclusively when some of both could work better. In the early 2000s I regularly met methodological opposition in my commissioned research. My own non-disciplinary and pragmatic approach to methods and theory is to use what is likely to work best to help me answer my research question, within the constraints of budget, timescale and so on. But some people are attached to specific methods or theories, whether through disciplinary or individual preference. I have long thought it is unnecessary and unhelpful to limit your options in that way.

In the later 2000s and early 2010s I observed little increases in flexibility here and there, such as some clinical researchers becoming more amenable to the occasional qualitative element, and some qualitative evaluators conceding that numbers could come in handy now and again. Further into the 2010s this began to pick up pace, and towards the end of the decade I noticed quantitative researchers discussing how difficult they found some aspects of qualitative research. Some comments I saved from online discussions included:

“As a medic, I found some challenges personally conducting quali research – I come from a more quant background.”

“I’m a biomed scientist who wants to learn and do mixed methods research. We’re not bad people but (gasp) have never been told any other method than the scientific method exists.“

“I was trained a positivist marine biologist and am now a marine social scientist… the field of social science has multiple philosophies that as natural scientists we rarely get to hear of, let alone understand.”

“I am also biomedical by background and have just started to use mixed methods/qual stuff. I am STRUGGLING it is really hard to wrap your head around if you’re just used to p values.”

I thought I could write a book to help people in these kinds of situations. So I did. And I’m delighted to say the finished book has already had some very good reviews. I am proud of what I have achieved with this book, and I hope it will help a lot of researchers.

By the way, if you’re interested in this subject you might want to join my Qualitative Research for Quantitative Researchers course at the Methods at Manchester summer school in June.

This blog, the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and the videos on my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved Patrons. Patrons receive exclusive content and various rewards, depending on their level of support, such as access to my special private Patreon-only blog posts, bi-monthly Q&A sessions on Zoom, free e-book downloads and signed copies of my books. Patrons can also suggest topics for my blogs and videos. If you want to support me by becoming a Patron click here. Whilst ongoing support would be fantastic you can make a one-time donation instead, through the PayPal button on this blog, if that works better for you. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!