Research through Others and Online

• In Event: Up for Interpretation? Reflections on Methods, Concepts, and Policies

Abstract

The challenges and constraints of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic led many scholars in Political Science to adopt and expand their use of online and proxy research methods. This includes increasingly turning to “others” to aid in research, from survey enumerators to archival assistants to proxy interviews and others ‘on the ground’ who may run focus groups or engage in other ethnographic and participatory activities. This also includes a growing trend of conducting research at a distance, through online interviews and other mediated means of interaction. Across both positivist and interpretivist research traditions using “others” in the research enterprise and researching across mediate online spaces is increasingly common and increasingly critiqued.

This paper takes a starting point the role of “others” and mediated spaces in research activities to explore the challenges, limitations, opportunities, and best practices of these methods. We offer a particular focus on using proxy interviewers and relying on online interviewing practices. Proxy interviewing refers to the use of others – often hired research assistants – to conduct, code, and interpret formal conversations with research participants, while online interviewing refers to using any number tools to connect to people remotely. In the paper we map out the challenges and opportunities of these aspects of research from a reflexive foundation, reflecting on the variable positionality of researchers of all kinds across different research interactions throughout the research process – from the design to implementation and interpretation stages. We argue that the use of others and online research raises both unique challenges and opportunities, and we provide actionable insights for students and scholars who may design research using these means. To do so, it is structured over two parts.

First, we survey recent and successful proxy and remote interviewing practices, including canonical accounts of the practice and important exemplars of its use. Here we draw on our own experiences conducting interviews online and over the phone and our relying on proxy interviews across a number of research projects pre-, during, and post-pandemic. This includes projects that relied on research assistants to conduct in-person and over the phone interviews in Kenya and Tanzania and online interviewing with regional diplomatic officials in Southeast Asia. Drawing on these experiences using remote and proxy interviewing alongside those of others, we use the section to highlight the importance of critically thinking about the positionality of researcher assistants and the role of mediated spaces and how these aspects of much of current political science research impacts both the conduct and interpretation of research. More narrowly, show how relying on others and using online tools may both delimits access and the conduct of interviews in particular ways, as well as opening the door to particular insights and opportunities.

The second section relies on these illustrations to advance a set of best practices for relying on others and online research centered on questions of access, the conduct of interactions, and the interpretation of knowledge. Here we outline what we term “situational reflexivity” and “group reflexivity” as two related conceptual tools to assist in navigating these kinds of interactions. The former refers to a process of interrogating the role of mediated spaces, accepting that all interactions from in-person to online are differently mediated and present both aspects of closeness and separation. The second is a related process building on the former wherein research assistants and the principal investigator regularly, systemically, and critically interrogate the dynamic effects of positionality across and within interactions and our appraisals of those interactions. Across both types of reflexivity, we outline a four-step process of journaling expectations, recording experiences, discussing assessments critically, and updating research protocols and practices dynamically. We conclude by reflecting how these approaches and processes could be adopted to other research designs, including those reliant on experimental, ethnographic, and survey work.

Authors

• Aarie Glas, Northern Illinois University

• Alesha Porisky, Northern Illinois University