Researcher–Participant Relationship

Both in the humanities and social sciences, researcher–participant relationships in themselves started to become a particularly overt topic in the 1980s. There was a growing sense of the inseparability of the actual object of research from the way in which researchers conducted their research and/or wrote up their findings and the type of knowledge produced.

In broader terms, researcher–participant relationships can be approached at a micro- and macrolevel: Whereas the microlevel refers to the individual researcher and participant, the macrolevel relates to the historically established status of researchers vis-à-vis their objects of study. This position was especially visible in 19th- and early 20th-century anthropological works, which were colored by the colonial conditions of power inequality. The authority attributed to Western researchers studying among non-Western peoples or populations—who usually occupied a lower social status than the researchers themselves—is illustrative of this historically and socially constructed inequality.

Since the 1980s, the position of researchers—with respect to their methodologies and techniques of conducting research as well as the textual authority that they acquire in their writings—has been scrutinized through intensive interdisciplinary debates. As a result, research participants have been attributed greater agency and are now seen as having more scope to influence the course of research. A concrete indication of this attitude is the change in the mode of addressing research participants: Especially in case studies, words that do not imply passivity, such as interviewees, participants, or collaborators, are now preferred to terms such as respondents or subjects. At the epistemological level, the positioning of participants and researchers in relation to each other is such that some scholars reject the formulation “data gathering” in favor of “producing data” in an effort to emphasize that there are no neutral data to be collected among people and to highlight the fact that as a consequence of our relationships to people we become part of the data that we produce. Although further elaboration of researcher–participant relations remains, issues revolving around the nature of relationships and power dynamics, the possibilities and accuracy of representation, the determination of ethical rules of engagement, and the dissemination of research results have been the major areas of problematization.