SOAN 3070 Chapter week 3: Article- Conducting Fieldwork At and Away from Home Shifting Researcher Personality with Mobile Interviewing Methods
5 Feb 2016
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Document Summary
Researchers at home and not at home interviewing: These insider/outsider myths dichotomize researcher positionality, creating categories which are inadequate to capture the complex and multi-faceted experiences of some researchers who find themselves neither total. Insiders nor outsiders in relation to the individuals they interview". I am arguing that we gain much needed specificity within these descriptions by considering more deeply the influence of mutual familiarity between researchers and participants when conducting fieldwork at home. Researchers-at-home also benefit from being able to quickly and easily identify the gatekeepers and key informants including relational details such as who were classmates, colleagues, or kin. two major challenges exist when studying such a familiar context. First, researchers-at-home must constantly grapple with the ways their own local knowledge and presumptions color their questions, interpretations, and representations.
