ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the not-so-obvious issues involved in choosing informants, crosschecking data, facing sensitive research topics, managing researcher's cultural and ecological footprint and giving back and finding ways to maintain credibility in the field. It considers more informal aspects of research methods, since most researchers reported that “textbooks” were not always helpful given the unpredictable nature of fieldwork. Experienced researchers uniformly emphasize the need to establish solid informal relationships with a diverse group of informants. Beyond the dynamics of researcher/respondent interaction, sometimes the political context can dramatically affect the process of interview and data collection. Overseas fieldwork is a process of discovery and extraction of information about events, cultures, and phenomena native to some place that is not one’s own. Researchers working in poor communities will commonly confront the morally vexing, and deeply culturally embedded practice of begging, especially by children. Joanna Upton offers some insightful thoughts from her experience of this in Niger.
