Gaining and Losing Access in International Settings

Access is viewed as continuous, always ongoing, and pertains to space, time, as well as the knowledge attained of the field in question (Leo, 1995; Reeves, 2010) and ethnographies as tentative; never finished, only left (Jefferey and Troman, 2004). Additionally, it could be argued that gaining and losing access in ethnographic research is not set to a specific field but rather remains with the researcher and informs their continued work through emotional participation. At least, this has been the case for me.

At the time of writing, I have conducted ethnographic court research in three different countries and legal systems: Scotland, the United States and Sweden. My experience of gaining access in each location has been different and demanded different things of me, meanwhile informing the next project. While much can be learned and facilitated by senior researchers and helpful gatekeepers, a successful entry to a research field largely boils down to the effort of the individual researcher and concerns both the practical and emotional aspects of their work. Here, I will focus on the emotional aspects of access concerning my own research experience.

Although emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), understood as the exchange of feeling for a salary following higher-order demands, in a strict theoretical sense cannot be applied to research, qualitative researchers do place expectations on their emotional participation to ensure success in their work. Succinctly, emotion work is crucial to research endeavours. What I mean is that we use our emotions to pick up on feeling rules, emotional repertoires and cultures, as well as shifts in interaction, as we enter any space of investigation (cf. Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2015). Emotion work pertains also to the efforts made to secure research participants’ interest in the study as well as to creating a safe space in which they can share their experiences.

For me, this implicit expectation of emotion work emerged in a distinct way after losing access in an ethnographic research project taking place in Scotland. While I was anecdotally aware of the difficulties that other researchers had experienced with gaining access to the courts in England, Scotland and Wales, access was, surprisingly, gained and I quickly started recruiting participants. After some time, the enrolled participants began retracting their participation following an internal notice to withdraw from the project and I ran into dead-ends everywhere I turned. Access, although administered and formally granted by way of the organizations own procedure, was somehow lost. While I will not go into the details further, this example illustrates how the act of gaining formal access, on its own, does not automatically secure continued fieldwork. Loosing access, and struggling to pinpoint what went wrong, lingered and carried over to the next time that access was at stake.

At my next attempt, this time in the US, I was bruised by my previous experience. I felt insecure and scared to repeat any potential previous mistakes; this led me to become more passive in my work, leaning more heavily on observations. This type of vulnerability is, in my view, often placed in the periphery in qualitative work, deemed as something to overcome and not to dwell on. Yet—for me—it held valuable lessons. Not only did it foreground the steps of research otherwise taken for granted, where I scrutinized each sentence in emails that I sent and every move I made in the field, it also made me realise that vulnerability in research is all encompassing; regardless of how I scrutinized my actions, I could not predict how my presence would be experienced by the actors in the field. Vulnerability became a companion and, amid feeling vulnerable, a courage to persist emerged.

Although I utilized a top-down approach also in the US, gaining formal access with the chief judge, and relied on snowball sampling to a degree, I began to do what I refer to as ‘cold opens.’ Not unlike the cinematic strategy, that is starting the plot before any title or credit rolls, this approach meant going in to recruit participants without having someone introduce me or referencing any other participant already enrolled in the project. Cold opens, as opposed to its’ counterpart, meant navigating scepticism and uncertainty while I had to brave the potential face-to-face rejection from the supposed participants. Still, recruiting new participants in this way did lend some breadth to the research, while challenging my preconceived notions that I was unequipped to secure access, formal and informal, long term.

As I am currently collecting material in Sweden, my previous experiences have taught me caution when I make my introductions but also courage to do so without prior contact. I continuously scrutinize interactions taking place in the field prior to making any introduction and if I sense any frustration or break to the ritual that may have affected the person of interest, I pause and delay the presentation of myself and the project. When the mood shifts, potentially also placing the individual in a different headspace, I ask to make their acquaintance. This does not mean that I am always successful, far from it. But through embracing my vulnerability, I now know that sensitivity, kindness and especially courage go a long way regardless of the country or place that we are investigating, and that access work, by way of our emotional experiences, trails from one project to the next.

References

Bergman Blix, Stina and Åsa Wettergren. 2015. “The Emotional Labour of Gaining and Maintaining Access to the Field.” Qualitative Research, 15(6):688–704.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

Jeffrey, B., & Troman, G. 2004. “Time for ethnography.” British Educational Research Journal, 30(4), 535–548.

Leo, R. A. 1995. “Trial and tribulations: Courts, ethnography, and the need for an evidentiary privilege for academic researchers.” The American Sociologist, 26(1), 113–134.

Reeves, C. L. 2010. “A difficult negotiation: Fieldwork relations with gate-keepers.” Qualitative Research, 10(3), 315–331.