ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three particular challenges that occurred in qualitative research with young women who have school before finishing upper secondary school. The three challenges concern participation - on behalf of the potential research participants as well as the researcher. I approach these situations as critical moments, critical for my understanding of and engagement in the research. More specifically, I address challenges related to recruitment, to researcher positionality and to managing relationships in the field. I demonstrate how encounters such as the ones described call for reflection to foster greater insight into the research process - what went well and what went wrong, and why did it go wrong - and ultimately ensure ethical research practices. I argue that these reflections must not be left as such but have to be treated as part of the data and therefore integrated into the data analysis.
