Upward turning points and positive rapport-development across time in researcher—participant relationships

By M. Pitts, Michelle Miller-Day. 2007

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Some of the first, and potentially most important, steps that researchers must take in the field are those related to rapport development with their participants. Both novice and experienced field researchers negotiate the difficulties and mysteries of establishing and maintaining this rapport. In this research, it was our intention to disentangle the often puzzling rapport-building process. We contacted 16 field researchers with varying degrees of experience and asked them to detail their relational turning points with select participants. Using the Retrospective Interview Technique (RIT) as a narrative prompt we uncovered a pattern of rapport-building that took the shape of five semipermeable phases of researcher—participant rapport: Other-Orientation, Self-in-Relation to Other, Self-and-Other Linking, Interpersonal Connection, and Partnership. In this article we propose a preliminary stage model of rapport-building trajectories, and offer implications such a model might have for field researchers.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Language and Linguistics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d13bcc25063959a7fae088149e431198ace3426

How researchers see this paper

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In General Health Professions

1. P. Danaher
2. Tom Clark
3. Alice V. Brown
4. J. Watts

In Language and Linguistics

1. P. Danaher
2. Tom Clark
3. Alice V. Brown
4. J. Watts

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Danaher
2. Tom Clark
3. Alice V. Brown
4. J. Watts

Citations in the corpus

• Emotion, empathy and exit: reflections on doing ethnographic qualitative research on sensitive topics (2008, background): “Pitts and Miller-Day (2007) suggest that the development of rapport with their participants is a priority for empirical researchers in the field and Gaglio et al (2006) argue that this is an essential component of successful qualitative research in the health care sector.”
• CHE Principles: facilitating authentic and dialogical semi-structured interviews in educational research (2017, background): “…and acknowledgment of others, such as using first names when appropriate to do so, the use of physical gestures and body language that reflects openness, and adopting a friendly approach that includes techniques like maintaining eye contact, tone of voice and smiling (Pitts and Miller-Day 2007).”
• On ‘being researched’: why do people engage with qualitative research? (2010, background): “Of course, the process of establishing trust, credibility, and rapport within qualitative research engagements have frequently been cited as central mechanisms that support research relationships (see Pitts and Miller-day, 2007; Sixsmith et al., 2003, for respective examples).”