Final reflections on fieldwork methodology and ethics

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The latter to be explored in the follow-up interviews that were about to be conducted with a special attention to how youth talk about what it does to them to see this year’s crew tell their stories.

As hoped all of the 5 youth were eager to participate and appointments were mad for the interviews in the weeks that followed. The purpose of the interview and the primary interview topic was also presented to the youth in an email I sent after they orally had agreed to participate at the benefit dinner. Here I invited the youth to tell me their program participation story – from the first contact and application decision to the present day. The interviews were scheduled to take place on the program farm in a newly established gathering tent at the corner of the field and took between 1 and 2 hours.

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increasingly motivated to share personal experiences that in other educational contexts would be considered ‘private’. This anticipation of a central finding in the study will be unfolded, analyzed and discussed in the following chapters of the dissertation but for now the analogy is important to have in mind when reflecting upon how research ethics were dynamically applied in a sort of companionship with the development and change in the social life in the program.

Davies also has an interesting point in relation to confidentiality regarding participant observation that is also relevant in a reflection on the way I strived to position myself in the beginning of the research process. Davies argues that because participant observation is “based on long-term and multi-stranded social relationships, discussions of confidentiality are normally inappropriate in the early stages since researchers usually only have access to the public life of their informants; instead it needs to be included in ongoing negotiations and explanations about the nature of the research and the conditions under which people are participating” (Ibid:59).

I would like to emphasize several things in relation to this point. In one way it is in line with the actual researcher role I aspired to in the first weeks of my participation in the extensive ‘spring internship’

part of the program. In the first weeks of this 10 week program I focused on taking part in the ‘public’

life of the interactions between youth and between youth and staff. I was formally presented by the staff as an applied researcher that was here to learn about the program in order to start a similar program in my own country.

And when it comes to qualifying the role as participant it was agreed that I should be explicitly delineated from the role and responsibilities of staff, i.e. in having leadership responsibilities in relation to running workshops and initiating different other activities, and more inhabit the role as an

‘intern’, different in almost all aspects from the youth but still with the aspiration through a status as co-worker to see how this could sustain a positive authentic presence.

A specific reflection that deals with the character of the relations I was able to build with the youth, compared to the relations that the staff were building to the youth is important to mention. An important aspect in the way staff talked about the learning and general process of change or personal transformation that they actively sought to address when relevant among some of the youth was ‘trauma’ and ‘healing’. This more therapeutic aspect of their relations to some of the youth will be described, analyzed and discussed in the forthcoming chapters but for now it is important to note a few points. One was that this was one of the main differences in the character of the relations I as a researcher was able to build with the youth as compared to the relations the staff builds to the youth. In the mentor-mentee relations that evolved between staff and youth, and that

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gradually became clear for me were an important part of the program pedagogy staff would often become knowledgeable about specific traumatic conditions or experiences that the youth were struggling with – this could be parents or older siblings drug or alcohol abuse, chronic illness, homelessness, violence etc. The forthcoming analysis will discuss what it means for the staff role to support youth in such life situations. In a reflective methodological perspective a central point is the way this awareness for me as a social anthropologist and researcher made me conscious of the role of possible trauma in the lives of the youth and how to deal with it in both the daily interaction as well in the interview situations. My strategy was here not to ignore but to build a trust that would make youth feel safe and secure to talk about trauma or other more sensitive topics if they chose to – with a strong awareness of the often very grey zone between an ethnographic and a therapeutic interview (Kvale 2008:15). In the actual outcome of the interviews as it will be presented in the following several stories about overcoming depression were told by the youth in different narratives about learning, identity and change.

In order to protect the anonymity of the individual youth that agreed to participate a few important aspects must be mentioned. Firstly I assured each individual youth that they would remain anonymous and that all names are changed to pseudonyms - as well as I would not mention the actual year of fieldwork. The latter was due to the potential of persons in the local context knowledgeable about the research could come to recognize individual youth identities. A specific challenge however exists in relation to the internal anonymization in relation to the staff’s potential recognizing of quotes from the specific youth that took part in the research and was interviewed.

This goes specifically for the 5 youth that participated in the follow-up study due to the more individual life history level of the analysis in this part of the research.

A similar challenge persists in relation to the necessary anonymizing of the staff that have all been given pseudonyms as well. As with the specific life history part of the analysis of the youth interviews the quotes cited from interviews with the staff persons will be personal referable for readers with a specific knowledge of the research project.

The third challenge – and arguably the largest– is in relation to anonymizing the specific program that is the primary empirical frame of the study. Here the descriptions of program’s physical setting – and the organizational connection to a university campus with an organic farmer training program as well as a resource center for garden based learning instantly makes the number of readers that are able to recognize the specific context much higher. I have however chosen to include these

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organizational aspects of the context in the descriptions as they play a role in the general pedagogical framework.