Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives

TLDR

Relational ethics in research with intimate others demands that researchers act from their hearts and minds, acknowledge interpersonal bonds, and take responsibility for their actions and consequences. The article offers guidance for scholars wishing to write about intimate others. The author analyzes ethnographic studies where researchers become friends with participants and autoethnographic narratives that include intimate others, discussing how to write about living and deceased subjects. Co‑constructed autoethnographies reduce certain ethical problems of traditional qualitative work with unfamiliar others while still sidestepping some concerns inherent in writing about intimate others.

Abstract

This article focuses on relational ethics in research with intimate others. Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Calling on her own research studies, the author examines relational ethics in ethnographies in which researchers are friends with or become friends with participants over the course of their projects. Then she examines autoethnographic narratives in which researchers include intimate others in stories focusing on their own experience. Considering ethical responsibilities to identifiable others, she discusses writing about those who are alive and those who have died. She then reflects on the ways co-constructed autoethnographies circumvent some of the ethical issues in traditional qualitative studies on unfamiliar others, yet avoid some of the ethical concerns in writing about intimate others. The last section presents advice for those who long to write about intimate others.