How close can you go? Dilemmas of proximity in ethnographic research

In ethnographic research the direct involvement and long-term engagement of the researcher constitute key elements. Acknowledgements of numerous publications resulting from ethnographic studies illustrate that the researchers are often deeply indebted to the research subjects for allowing the researchers to follow them around. Thus it is impossible to carry out ethnographic work without obtaining access, getting involved in, and sharing the lives of the people that are subjects to such studies. Gaining the access, which is clearly in the interest – even a prerequisite – of the ethnographer, might constitute a problem in itself, as it actualizes the question of the interest of the research to the participants. Why should they allow the researcher to enter and describe their circumstances of life? What kind of interest might they have or accept in sharing their experiences with a researcher?
Once having gained access to participate in and describe the lives of the participants of a given context, the next ethical question facing the researcher is the one of involvement. Again, the researcher has an interest in obtaining as much confidence as possible, whereas the interest of the observed subjects might be more dubious and a matter of difficulty to handle by the researcher.
The obvious dilemma of conflicting interests and difficult handling of proximity is our focus of interest in this paper:
One side of this dilemma is to ask the question, how close you need to go to obtain the confidence of the participants in the research context and the necessary in-depth insight to understand their cultures and conditions of life. Another side of it is to ask, how close you can go without violating in a symbolic sense the lives of the participants and their rights of privacy.
This further raises the question, how does the presence of the researcher alter the dynamics of the observed reality and the lives of the people in it? Not a new question asked in research, but still a necessary and ethical question to ask and deal with in any ethnographic work, and for the authors of the paper an important question in planning a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children labeled as talented athletes joggling school, training, competition, friends, and family. The study plan includes a vision of following the children in their daily lives in a way that is inspired by the intensive data-gathering techniques employed by Annette Lareau in her study of family patterns in the USA (Lareau, 2011).
This raises preliminary questions as to how such a fieldwork can be carried out; both to ensure the necessary provision of empirical data to carry out ethnographic analyses and challenge existing theoretical frameworks, and to ensure that the subjects under scrutiny are not subject to ethical violations. With this in mind the above dilemmas of proximity will be addressed and discussed in our paper.