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The "Near Miss": A Story of Relationship

University of British Columbia

Carol P. Herbert

University of Western Ontario

Doing good qualitative research requires engaging with the ethical and epistemologicalchallenges of deliberately entering into relationships with people to learn about them.The authors draw on an event in their personal lives for insight into research relationships,hoping to deepen their understanding of how these relationships feel and workfrom research participants' perspectives. The authors present their experience in twolinked vignettes to explore ways research participants might experience research abouttheir experiences of loss, pain, shame, and social stigma and to address ways researcherscan begin to understand how it feels to be the "written about" in research projects aboutsuch topics. They frame their discussion around three areas that arise from the vignettes:the increased risk to research participants when they like and trust researchers who misunderstandtheir experiences, the personal costs of disclosure, and the need for flexibleresearch plans that can adapt to the interpersonal demands of intimate researchrelationships.

Key Words: research relationships • ethics • feminist research • consent

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