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This paper analyses the phenomenon of the death of informants. Based on his own experience with the long-term (1999-2016) research of Voyvodovo - the only Czech village in Bulgaria, the author shows what the death of one's informants means for the research and the researcher. The author argues that any long-term fieldwork entails emotional involvement of the researcher, and so the departure of his or her informants has a deep impact on the researcher's well-being. The articles also address methodological consequences of the death of informants, namely, the case when the death of all of them leads to a situation that the group ceases to exist. The author shows that with the last member's passing away Malinowski's 'native's point of view' is lost forever. The author also suggests that the topic of death of informants should be included into educational curricula for fieldwork training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As units of analysis, documents are often seen as unproblematic, easily accessed sources of data. This research note discusses and reflects on a research project where documents were not easy to access and instead prompted significant negotiation, contained disturbing information and images and had an emotional impact on the researcher. A reflexive account is provided in this paper, which draws upon feminist methodological theory and explores the researcher’s experiences of using documents in research. The paper concludes that documents should not always be categorised as a low risk data source, rather issues such as access difficulties, ethical dilemmas and potential emotional harm, should also be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The pressures of funding and publishing requirements often make it difficult for researchers to pay close, detailed and reflexive attention to methods as an integral part of their research work. This paper reports on a project about women's perceptions of health, health risks and osteoporosis which was designed explicitly to explore methodological and epistemological issues as they arose and were renegotiated during the research. Three experienced qualitative researchers carried out equal parts of this small piece of research, and reflected on how faced with the same topic and conditions they each did their interviewing and analysis. Through reflexive attention to their feelings of dissatisfaction with the quality of this qualitative work the authors highlight the importance of effects of project design and collaborative working on both the social and material relations of the interview itself and the experiential and contextual depth of the data. The paper concludes with a consideration of its implications for teamworking in qualitative projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the benefits of pursuing difficult, antagonistic, research relationships in the context of biographical interviewing methods that are sensitive to spatial relationships. It argues that confronting sources of tension between researchers and informants and being more open about the emotional baggage we bring to the field as researchers yields more rigorous fieldwork with more insightful results. The argument is developed from a particularly difficult research relationship: an encounter between the author and a British expatriate diving instructor living in Hong Kong. The broader context of the research is the production of white privilege through migration and the operation of global/postcolonial landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]