“I’ll Tell You What You Need to Know.” How Respondents Negotiate the Sense of Meaning- Making—Methodological Reflections from the Field Based on Ethnographic Study of Lesbian Parenting in Poland

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how various interactional and interpretational contexts arising from specific researcher—research participants relationship established in the course of doing ethnographic study on sensitive, and thus often enough resistant to immediate cognition, phenomenon, namely, lesbian parenting in Poland, as well as different ways of embracing these, may factor into the research process. Drawing on specific dilemmas I encountered while doing the study at hand—from engaging a hard-to-reach population that, in a sense, wished to be reached, and the consequences thereof; through being pushed out of the comfort zone as the women under study, in the wake of becoming acquainted with the analysis I offered, “switched” from narrating their “in-orderto motives” to reflecting on the “because motives” behind their actions; to contextualizing emotions arising as my response to experiencing the issues they face (on a daily basis), to name a few—my goal here is to discuss how different ways of collecting and analyzing data—in the context of developing rapport with the women under study—have had an impact on conceptualizing and (re)framing the data at hand.