Mistaking friendliness for friendship

In "Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork," Kirsch describes the problems that arise when, through developing the rapport necessary for interviews and ethnographies, participants "mistake a good interview fora  therapeutic situation."  Feminist scholarship has encouraged rapport and minimizing the distance between researcher and the researched, but Kirsh warns that such a pendulum can swing too far. Our participants can sometimes forget or repress the understanding of an interview space and divulge information they may later wish they hadn't, or may also feel a sudden sense of betrayal or anger and wish to shut down an interview for being too personal, even if they had been answering more personal questions all along.  Researchers, too, can be duplicitous (even if unintentional) by establishing rapport only to up and leave when the information is collected. 

Kirsch reminds us that it is our responsibility as researchers to be extremely cautious about what we are promising when we build rapport, because "friendliness" can be easily mistaken for "friendship."  Our scholarship is almost always not founded on long term relationships, but rather "simulate the context of relationships" where "the flow of information is one-sided."  In order to resolve the potential disregard for the emotional effects participants may experience, Kirsch suggests that we ask for consent again at the end of an interview, allow for our participants to set boundaries, and "respect - and expect - participants' silence, distance, and withdrawal."  Rather than see consent as something static and one-timed, we should conceive of consent as ever renegotiable.  Rather than see all of our participants as people we should 'like' and enjoy being around, we should always remember that "our interactions with participants are most often based on friendliness, not genuine friendship." 

What struck me most about this article was it suggested about the lack of genuine friendships we collectively seem to have.  What passes for friendship in our lives is often rather surface and superfluous...we have mistaken friendliness for friendship with 'friends' who aren't researchers, too.  We are so hungry for authentic relationships that when a researcher comes along with a long list of questions about us and all the time in the world to listen to us answer them uninterrupted, we think we're BFFs.  Establishing greater boundaries between 'friendliness' and 'friendship' is not only not only necessary for more ethical and honest research, but it is necessary for sustaining deeper, more lasting friendships in our everyday lives.  We should all have people surrounding us who offer us the "undivided attention, sincere interest, and warmth" afforded by an ethnographer, but without actually dashing off to write up a study picking apart what we just said.  While I agree with Kirsh that such boundaries are crucial to our research, I also wonder if this also means many of us just need better friends, or - more importantly - need to be better friends.