ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains how and why the recognition of self-help groups' importance in respondents' lives triggered changes in her approach to this research. Humour can also re-present and indicate 'communicative distance' in another way because it is often employed tactically in ways that concretize or problematize group-identities. The author recounts the processual changes in her own research programme in relation to the various ways in which different individuals in different groups deployed humour over the course of the project. Self-help groups thus problematize in a rather different way the 'communicative ideal' that is often thought to underlie feminist research methodologies. The author argues that the manner in which humour is employed in all these ways can act as an indicator of the communicative distance between researcher and researched and of the group dynamics itself. This is because, in order to work, humour has to call upon a basis for shared meanings.
