Negotiating Exit

Relationships, Friendships, and Dependencies

Qualitative researchers create friendships, dependencies, and sometimes hostilities with field participants. Because researchers cannot simply pack up and slip away at midnight, negotiating how to say good-bye, maintain desired relationships, and end those that cannot be maintained are crucial parts of the exit process. Of first concern are key informants and good friends. Strategies for the difficult process of maintaining long-distance relationships must be negotiated. Friends must know if the researcher will return to the field and for what reasons and how often they will write, email, or call—all are problematic once researchers return home to their normal lives.

Other contact may be needed beyond that of maintaining friendships. Researchers or their students and colleagues may want to return to the field site because they need further data collection or need to begin new projects, they discover that they have neglected to collect some critical data, they need to check on the validity of their interpretations of data, or they require additional data to answer questions raised during data analysis that were unanticipated in the field. Preexisting field contacts can facilitate return. If researchers cannot return, clear lines of communication, goodwill, and firm relationships in the field make possible asking key informants to collect information or answer questions that arise during data analysis, checking initial and subsequent formulation of results with participants, or validating interpretations.

Leaving the field can be more problematic with casual field acquaintances researchers develop, given the expectations such individuals develop of researchers. Researchers are linked to a more cosmopolitan and often wealthier community than that of participants, and therefore are sources of information, intellectual stimulation, outside contacts, and resources. Participants whose slight marginalization from the community makes them perfect insider–outsider informants also may have expectations of the researcher as a source of companionship, status, and even financing. Although important to the researcher for data, casual acquaintances may highly value their contact with the researcher for other reasons. The nature and depth of such expectations may be difficult for researchers to identify. Some participants simply mourn the loss of emotional ties and status.

Others will miss the economic resources researchers provide when they, for example, obtain scarce foreign pharmaceuticals for participants, link local craftspeople to buyers in the United States, buy school supplies for students and teachers in a local school, rent from local property owners, or pay for language classes. Researchers represent career development for local professionals who obtain from them new ideas or techniques that enhance performance and reputations in ways that locals without such access cannot. Since attenuating or ending these benefits can cause loss or hardship, researchers must explain what resources they are able to continue providing or help participants develop alternative sources of supply. Once they have left the field, researchers also must decide how to handle ongoing requests from, or the reality of help needed by, field participants, including for such things as obtaining further education for themselves and their children.

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