Making mistakes in ethnography

Abstract

Starting from the question: “How do mistakes arise in ethnography and how do they influence research trajectories?” this article makes a methodological and practical contribution to the literature on ethnography. I draw on three ethnographic studies spanning 2014 to 2020 carried out in sport organisations. Here, I consider mistakes as charged revelatory moments to unpack three interwoven aspects of mistakes: (a) wishful thinking, (b) the influence of social relationships, and (c) reflexivity. I make the case that mistakes will likely arise from extended participant observation periods. These mistakes can activate attention for similar mistakes in the future and thus limit attention to other unforeseen challenges. Further, I argue that no amount of planning, reading, preparation, and reflexivity can make researchers immune to mistakes when venturing into complex real-world settings and researching with people. Instead, they can lead to a deeper appreciation of the research context.

Making mistakes in ethnography

A scientist is moving the cursor about on the screen. Clicking increasingly frantically through open browser tabs with cloud storage folders, documents, and emails. From a locked drawer, he pulls out a waterproof external hard drive with an orange trim. Types the password and dives into the backup. September-December, check. January - February, check. March… March… Gone. Several hard-earned days of audio fieldnotes lost.

In the social sciences, it can be useful to rely on personal experiences such as the afternoon it dawned on me that I had lost important fieldnotes. I began ruminating on my research history. Had I made other mistakes? What characterised them? What about the situations they happened in? How did I and others react? Were they preventable?

With these questions swirling around in my mind, I tried to collate them into a coherent research question. Hence, I begin with the question: how do mistakes arise in ethnography and how do they influence research trajectories? From this question, I make the case that acknowledging mistakes at a deeper level other than something to be prevented can provide a methodological and practical contribution to the field of ethnography. I begin by surveying reflexivity because it is often posited as the prevention and solution to errors in research processes. Second, I suggest a lens through which we can examine mistakes more closely. Against this backdrop, I recount carefully chosen mistakes from three consecutive ethnographic studies carried out between 2014 and 2020. Each of these mistakes can be considered dense, revelatory, and ethically important moments (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Trigger et al., 2012); I will come back to elaborate on these terms later. I use stories about my fieldwork to discuss three features of mistakes (a) wishful thinking, (b) the influence of social relationships, and (c) reflexivity.

For clarification, this paper is an examination of mistakes in ethnography. So, do not expect solutions.

Reflexivity in research

By now, the literature on ethnography offers comprehensive insights and guidance on how to plan, carry out, and navigate research for beginners and seasoned fieldworkers. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully regurgitate this guidance, and I can only gesture to some of the several inspiring sources in this article.

Of course, many colleagues acknowledge their mishaps when providing stories of how to navigate ethnography. In a review, Verbuyst and Galazka (2023) gathered stories of “time wasted”, lost fieldnotes, challenging gatekeepers, or emotional overwhelm. Other colleagues have focused on the influence of theoretical misalignment, failing to understand the context, struggles with rapport building, lost fieldnotes, excessive navel-gazing whilst forgetting about the participants, bridging the gap between the academy and “the real world”, and how to cope as a researcher (cf. Burawoy 2013; Verbuyst and Galazka 2023; Valério et al. 2022; Jemielniak and Kostera 2010; King-White 2013; Campbell 2020; Ryang 2000). Nevertheless, reviewing this literature shows that accounts of failure or mistakes tend to hurry forward to a silver lining or lessons learned (Mattes and Dinkelaker, 2019; Verbuyst and Galazka, 2023).

Starting from reflexivity, most researchers treat mistakes as avoidable occurrences. They do so by suggesting that mistakes can be prevented and overcome by choosing the right theoretical framework (Burawoy, 2013), thorough planning (Campbell, 2020), or sufficient critical introspection (Valério et al., 2022). These ideas align with the reflexivity turn in social science. This turn meant that reflexivity has become a household name in planning, navigating (e.g., reflexive practice; Benson and O’Reilly 2022), and interpreting (e.g., reflexive thematic analysis; Braun and Clarke, 2019) research. Embracing the researcher’s positionality and making their involvement transparent is seen as fundamental to rigorous research.

However, the reflexivity turn has also been argued as the catalyst for a narcissistic turn (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Stachowski, 2020). Accordingly, some critics find reflexivity “at best, self-indulgent, […] and at worst, undermining the conditions necessary for emancipatory research” (Pillow, 2003: p. 176). In relation to mistakes, Lareau (1996) critiques the tendency to camouflage failure, thereby making reflexivity an illusion of clarity. Furthermore, Pillow (2003) problematised the idea of reflexivity as a path to transcendence and absolution from “mis (representations)” (p. 186-187) and asked whether we only desire to hear certain reflexive stories. Here, she implied those stories in which researchers overcome their woes. This question is critical when examining mistakes. Because, on the one hand, it can be argued that mistakes arise due to lapses or a lack of reflexivity. On the other hand, reflexivity can be thought of as a veil creating a phantom academic, flawless in thought and action.

Interrogating reflexivity is, therefore, critical in moving forward with any examination of mistakes. Because clearly, mistakes happen. Accounts dating back to Malinowski (sometimes argued to be the founder of modern ethnography) are evidence of this. Further, it is also likely insufficient to point a finger at “chaotic” fieldwork making reflexivity impossible (Mattes and Dinkelaker, 2019). To this end, Reeves (2010) and Bott (2010) both argue that they were drawn into unforeseen challenges despite careful preparation and reflexive practice. Hence, I argue that scrutinising the role of reflexivity entails diving into ethnography’s twists and turns influenced by complex social settings (see Matthews 2021).

Mistakes as a sensitising concept

Acknowledging that reflexivity is not merely an antidote but should be part of the examination necessitates a somewhat more open conceptualisation of mistakes than favoured to date. Thus far, researchers have mostly used the language of fallacies or failure when discussing things that can go wrong (Burawoy, 2013; Jemielniak and Kostera, 2010; Verbuyst and Galazka, 2023). This typically implies a lack of reasoning or an antithesis to success. Yet, things can go wrong despite having structure, reasoning, and coherent research plans. This is evidenced by the many studies considered rife with fallacies or failures that make it to publication (Burawoy, 2013).

Accordingly, I propose using the terminology of “mistakes.” Mistakes are smaller incidents that highlight misjudgements, blunders, errors, or misinterpreted situations arising by happenstance. Thus, a mistake can be viewed as a belief, which is acted upon but later proven incorrect (Sheehan, 2000). Connecting this definition to reflexivity means that positioning, navigating, and interpreting can lead to certain well-founded beliefs about what is going on, but they can still prove incorrect.

Mistakes also concern day-to-day moments that arise when carrying out research among people. When mistakes become apparent to the researcher, they can provoke emotional and physical changes in the researcher and, perhaps, recast the research in a new light. To capture these changes in the researcher and how the research is viewed, I propose connecting mistakes to “revelatory moments” as articulated by Fujii (2015) and Trigger et al. (2012). Their work shows that revelatory moments can arise without forewarning or planning. Such moments can be dense, charged incidents, scenes, or patterns that often arise from extended periods of immersion and participant observation. Taking this perspective also implies that mistakes can occur spontaneously, remain unnoticed until unexpected consequences emerge, and be brief yet intense periods that provoke significant realisations in the researcher or individuals within the researched context. Altogether, such (sometimes) dramatic events can lead to a deeper understanding of the contextual nuances being studied (Trigger et al., 2012).

Further, if mistakes indeed involve beliefs that later are proven incorrect, then we must consider such moments as ethically important (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004). Most if not all research undergoes ethical review before the fieldwork begins. Nonetheless, many researchers undertaking prolonged ethnography encounter a dissonance between ethical tick-boxes and unpredictable events (Stachowski, 2020). In Norway, this is acknowledged in part by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data, which recognises the improbability of foreseeing all possible events and reaching all known and unknown individuals passing through a research site or project (SIKT, 2024). Microethics is, therefore, critical. It refers to everyday ethical issues that arise continuously. To this end, smaller moments can “seem unimportant because they have an ‘everyday’ sort of quality” (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004: p. 265). Yet, tying this to mistakes sensitises us to the idea that beliefs proven incorrect or changes in those beliefs can raise ethical questions such as: do the mistakes make participants or the researcher more or less vulnerable? Or what mistakes are ethically acceptable?

By linking mistakes, revelatory moments, and ethically important moments, I intend to use them as sensitising concepts and analyse patterns, logic, and practices happening within complex relationships that evolve continuously during fieldwork. This approach acknowledges that we—as researchers—cannot control the timing or implications of mistakes. Accordingly, they often occur spontaneously during the complexity of daily life among people in their settings. Being attentive to mistakes urges researchers to consider that they might lead us down unknown paths to a new rugged empirical terrain.

In the following, I will share three revelatory mistakes. The specific analytical approach draws on Heaton’s (2008) secondary analysis to glean temporal insights from the three sequential ethnographic studies I carried out between 2014 and 2020. The available data included interview transcripts and recordings, images, video clips, online sources (e.g., online groups, chatrooms, and forums), and field notes. Briefly, the settings for these studies were (1) a Danish track and field club; (2) taekwondo, fencing, and football clubs in Denmark; and (3) Olympic sports in the United Kingdom. The stories below provide more context.

Story 1: My Favourites

Shortly before the first ethnographic study, (at 24 years old) I had started a 2-year MSc in Humanities in Social Sport Science. During the first semester, I was invited to audit a PhD course on methods in social sport science. Feeling inspired by the speakers, I (a Greenhorn researcher ¹ ) rushed into an independent research project as an elective self-study.

Briefly, I went (almost) straight from the course to a track and field club to do a 15-week (mini-)ethnographic study of their talent environment. A close personal friend (Coach R) provided access to the club. He was a coach in the club and introduced me around. Most of my presence in the club happened as a passive observer from the vantage point of his training group. One day, after a few weeks at the club, my friend called and asked if I wanted to join him and another coach for an afternoon at the driving range at a local golf club. We went. Had a few beers. And spoke about the club.

Prior relationships allowed me to access the coaches’ breakroom and trips to the driving range, which may have been restricted to others. Somewhat naïvely, I developed “favourites” to talk to in the club, which likely swayed my subjectivity and data.

Consequently, I was forgetting about other groups and their views on the sports environment. Possibly, due to a desire to maintain social relationships and make myself believe that it led to frank and candid stories (e.g., at the driving range).

Going back to the field notes, I noticed an over-reliance on a few key participants and several unexplored subgroups with potentially valuable knowledge. Considering that I was supposed to study the whole environment, this can probably be labelled as a blunder or misjudgement. It was most evident in field notes where some coaches (My Favourites) spoke of an “encroaching” new group of high-profile athletes who had recently joined:

We are having coffee in the coaches’ meeting room. It is almost undrinkable because it is so bitter. One of the coaches (Coach K) is talking about the new group: “I think you can see a lot of groups segregated from other groups in the club. People are not interested in letting their prospects train with other coaches because they don’t want to give their best athletes away.” Coach M replies something like: “That is probably true. Also, having [that coach] back in the club. They are really a club in the club” (Field Notes, March 2014, Denmark).

Several other notes show that most people continued to deny the presence of and connection to the encroaching group. Doing so became a way to sustain their way of doing things. Attempting to maintain good relationships with My Favourites meant I never spoke to the encroaching group.

Wishful thinking, timing, and ethics of othering

The mistake happened due to a gradual process rather than an abrupt wrong turn. My entry to the field site signifies how I had to navigate a ‘still-forming political stance’ (Bott, 2010: p. 164). Being welcomed by a friend and introduced around meant that I quickly developed a rapport and eventually was invited into otherwise inaccessible spaces. Similar to Burawoy (2013) and Bott (2010), I engaged in wishful thinking and projected my hopes of candid insights onto the people who invited me in. Looking back, I can see that I highly likely missed out on valuable insights because I did not question why these spaces (e.g., the trips to the golf club) were inaccessible to many others. Instead, I was attracted to the secret sharing and insights I believed they would give me. The people who invited me along are the ones whose ideas and words most heavily featured in my data set. Others, who seemed less attractive or “encroaching” were not as prominent (for an examination of attraction in ethnography, see Joseph 2013).

I used the word “Greenhorn” at the beginning of the story to signal that this was likely one of those mistakes, which could have been prevented with more experience, planning, and being more reflexive. If the goal of ethnographic research is to examine “how the culture functions” (Joseph, 2013: p. 6), then being attracted to participants can lead to one-sided data. The consequences of the mistake for this study were, arguably, small. Only my supervisor read the report and now it languishes on a hard drive somewhere. I only use the data here to deliver my shortcomings on a silver platter. Further, the mistake only became clear to me long after writing up the report when we (Coach R and I) planned the next study and again when drafting this paper. The timing of my realisation reveals an additional feature of mistakes. It shows that our (emotional) interpretation of mistakes is to some degree influenced by the relationship between the size (or consequences) of the mistake and the timing of realising that it was a mistake.

Ethically, the limited harm to participants and limited influence of ideas proposed in the report allowed it to go unnoticed for years. This suggests that ethics related to mistakes is a slippery concept. If the mistake is small enough it might slip away due to focusing on subjectively more important issues. Scrutinising the relationship between the size and timing of mistakes could involve taking that second step back and asking: “How do I know?” Asking that question could have revealed mistakes earlier on by revealing who was included in the research, who was not, and why (cf. Guillemin and Gillam 2004). These are questions we can bring forward to interpret the coming stories.

Story 2: Sharing influence with participants and losing control

Spring 2015. Now 25 years old and time for the master thesis. The purpose was to examine how coaches developed life skills (e.g., planning, concentration, goal setting) in adolescents participating in different sports. It started with my friend, the coach (Coach R) from the first study.

Let me introduce him as Rosalie (pseudonym).

Rosalie and I, two research rookies ² , began the study with an ambitious and almost hubristic vision to challenge consensual common sense in Danish sports clubs. That is, examining how it comes about rather than what it is. In this study, how rationales (consensual common sense) among people involved with the elite sport pathway were negotiated and reified.

The foundation for the [second] study was established at a sport psychology workshop on a Thursday evening in 2014 in [the track and field club from Study 1]. Rosalie was there as a coach and I as a researcher studying the talent environment in the club. Present were also athletes and coaches. Most of them had first had a two-hour morning workout, then seven hours in high school, a three-hour training session after school, and now a three-hour workshop on planning and balance. A subject which was supposed to support the athletes ended up being a strain. (Thesis, submitted June 2016)

The excerpt from the thesis shows a common rationale that the only feasible way to develop life skills was through long workshops at the end of tiring days. And it was reified by continuing the practice in clubs all over Denmark (and possibly much wider than that). This was mainly accepted due to the resources necessary for an embedded organisational sport psychologist, and practice being focused on physical and technical skills.

To question these rationales, we partnered with three Copenhagen-based coaches in fencing, football, and taekwondo to examine different socio-economic groups (i.e., children of immigrants playing football and taekwondo in the Northwestern part of the city and affluent fencing families in the Northeast) as well as mixed and single-gender groups.

Rosalie knew the first study and some of the challenges I had encountered overlooking how attraction to some groups influenced my data collection. So, we decided on a passive observer role throughout the whole study to provide space for the coaches to follow their own development without intervening in their natural setting (Valério et al., 2022). Another rationale was that distance could provide us with an opportunity to remain aware of how the coaches would attempt to direct our attention. We hoped to notice how and why some groups might be marginalised. Also, being two people, we could act as critical friends to each other, in case one would get more attracted to certain participants. Yet, in our effort to see how we might be seduced, we ended up too far away. The field note below illustrates our revelation:

“You’re like two anthropologists sitting there in the corner. It feels like you are observing monkeys or something.” Coach M gives Rosalie and me a look as he moves among the fencers. His normal tongue-in-cheek behaviour is directed at us. We have tried to give him space to try out the techniques for himself so that we can see how he reflects on them. But it seems like we’re a bit too far removed.

Attuning to past mistakes and missing new ones

The story of planning the next ethnographic study shows how we designed it based on beliefs that getting “too close” or becoming attracted to participants could be detrimental to the research. The last field note, however, is one of many that shows that our effort to maintain distance instead was perceived as reclusive. Matthews (2021) argues that limited engagement through detachment from or distance to participants can result in a shallow analysis. And as we have seen, it became clear that the participants wanted us to be more intimately familiar. That is, through closeness gain a deeper appreciation for their lifeworld.

There is, however, a tension in this story that complicates the relationship between mistakes and reflexivity.

On the one hand, Guillemin and Gillam (2004) posited that: ‘a reflexive researcher is one who is aware of all these potential influences and is able to step back and take a critical look at his or her own role in the research process’ (p. 275). Based on this idea, it is unlikely that we were reflexive. Done and dusted.

However, with reflexive positioning as a starting point, the story also shows that we spent considerable time considering the power relationships between us and the participants and months getting to know the environment. Our planning also entailed discussing what Benson and O’Reilly (2022) mention about “exploring the conditions over which we had little to no control” (p. 182). We adapted our positionality as we became aware of potential twists and turns related to the relationships with the participants. This is to some degree what Benson and O’Reilly (2022) label as being reflexive. And yet, it complicates “being aware of … all potential influences.” Our belief was still proven incorrect.

So, besides showing the role of wishful thinking and timing, the story also reveals how the salient memory of a mistake from the first study influenced the next. Verbuyst et al. (2023) explain how some mistakes are due to biases in the researcher. Based on this story, we can add that one of these biases could be relying on salient examples of recent mistakes when evaluating decisions. Connecting this to reflexivity, Verbuyst and Galazka (2023) also argue that ‘we perform reflexivity akin to a process of ticking of boxes from a generic list of things “to potentially be aware of”’ (p. 69).

So, there is the potential that mistakes can arise because the list of things we should be aware of is influenced by our past experiences. Or at least our attention to certain things on that list is. Specifically, it seems that our past mistakes are more salient to us than abstract ones from the literature. Adding to Guillemin and Gillam (2004), it might be that the mistakes we make in the field put a spotlight on some potential influences whilst others drop to the back of our mind.

Story 3: Shifting self-interests

Colleagues have on a few occasions read earlier drafts of this paper. When they arrived at the following story, many have argued something along the lines of: “This is not really your mistake.”

Nevertheless, this story is about reflexive navigation. An essential element of ethnographic studies where dealing with participants’ competing personal interests can be a constant balancing act (Benson & O’Reilly, 2022; Stachowski, 2020). Deciding how to proceed with research unearthing conflict, bribery, and destructive culture raises questions about who the researcher represents.

We have now arrived at my PhD project. At 27, I was a punk ³ going to Liverpool. Here, I set out to examine the under-the-surface processes influencing organisational life in Olympic sports federations in the United Kingdom.

With my past mistakes in mind, I considered having a more active role.

This is where Wacquant’s (2015) thoughts on enactive ethnography entered for me.

In short, taking this approach demands ‘performing the phenomenon’ to attain an embodied experience of organisational life (Wacquant, 2015: p. 1). I found this to be a solution to the mistakes I had made in the past two studies seeing as it helped me examine attraction to some participants and move from the periphery to participate more in daily life.

So, I entered an Olympic sports federation for 10-14 days every month for just under 2 years. I also decided to visit other sports federations to test the findings from the main case, and to get a glimpse into my own na(t)iveness.

To move from the corner into the turmoil, I decided what had been missing was a middle space (for a great introduction to middle spaces, I suggest this paper by Zygouris-Coe et al., 2001).

Middle spaces can be thought of as a place for negotiating the researchers’ and participants’ interests. Or—a space for taking up conflicts.

One group I put in motion was a monthly meeting among the athlete development leadership. Here, we discussed everything from the federation’s website, schedules, and budgets to selection, coaching, and athlete development. I had one of those pale-yellow sticky notes on the first page of my research diary with a couple of reminders. One of them was a question from Wacquant (2015): “Whose point of view is it and taken at what moment in time?” (p. 8). Obviously, the athlete development leadership’s views are different from the athletes’, parents’, semi-frequent coaches’ or administrators’ views. Hence, I also looked to develop informal groups to glean insights from elsewhere in the complex hierarchies and social relationships.

Reflexive positioning, check.

Reflexive navigation, check.

I thought I had nailed it.

However, fate would have it that the organisation I entered went through significant financial and resource restructuring while I was there. One of the consequences was increased insecurity among employees. This meant that people became siloed and protective of what they had and perpetually tried to create uncertainty around other people. In this, antagonistic conflict and stress flourished.

Hence, I faced unforeseen challenges regarding the participants’ and organisation’s ability to consent to unknown changes. One middle space quickly became several silos. And many of them became forums for discussing bullying, financial trouble, job insecurity, who could be trusted and so on. My position in the many varied groups meant that I became privy to many personal stories, which required significant confidentiality and constantly negotiating ethical issues (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004). Hence, I began a practice of obtaining informed consent over and over again. To understand what I could pass on, what I could use as research, and what to leave unspoken.

I had not anticipated how participants’ frequently changing self-interests would influence my research and was somewhat unprepared. This became even more apparent when we began hearing well-substantiated rumours of bribes. In less than 24 hours I went from the floor of a gym in South England, back to my supervisor’s office in Liverpool, and onwards to someone from the institute’s leadership to discuss the legal, moral, and ethical consequences of continuing.

The bribery rumours happened as the conflict and antagonistic behaviours had led to a destructive culture in the organisation. Also, the historical context to this development was that the culture became destructive alongside the investigations and publishing of several concerning reports detailing adverse behaviours in British sport (e.g., Grey-Thompson 2017).

Separately, these two developments were worrying.

Together, they could be devastating.

I went through the process of figuring out how to publish findings that could jeopardise funding allocation in the current sports climate, and thereby people’s jobs and livelihoods. Jobs for people I considered friends or at least felt a sense of responsibility. Enter, “reflexive interpretation” (Benson & O’Reilly, 2022: p. 187).

Suddenly, I had to make daily visits to my inner ethics advisor and ask whether my research was justifiable or even necessary. The organisation had made itself available to the research, which always comes with an implied loss of power on their part. Publishing findings about conflict and damage (without repair) can be rationalised in the name of the higher good; and yet, at odds with research ethics and free choice of participation. All these considerations were voiced in the meeting with my supervisor, a person from the university leadership, and me.

Luckily, conversations were happening in London among the main gatekeeper (i.e., the chief executive officer), the board, and legal counsel. They had investigated the rumours and sorted any issues they may have found. I soon received a phone call from the main gatekeeper who argued that it was important to continue the research because they needed help unravelling their challenges (Field Notes, December 2017, United Kingdom).

In the following, we renegotiated the original scope of the research with gatekeepers, employees, and all other participants to ensure informed consent. Ahead of submitting an academic article on destructive culture, the main gatekeeper read several drafts of the paper and had a voice in defining the wording describing the organisation to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. Hence a shared judgement was made regarding the potential harm of publishing the research and the conclusion was that the findings would benefit the target audience (i.e., researchers via an academic journal). The findings could also, potentially, benefit the organisation because it had made significant changes in a positive direction (e.g., implementing new policies and regulations) and show how they successfully dealt with severe conflict.

Mistakes in complex and changing relationships

As an observant participant, I was part of the organisation and relationships among the people with whom I researched. This position afforded me insights into sports culture that literature rarely captures. It can be arduous to establish and maintain relationships with people engaging in bullying or legally questionable activities. The relational claustrophobia was suffocating and I wanted to retreat to the periphery again (for a definition, see Stachowski 2020, 182). Feeling a sense of responsibility to the research community, I remained in the chaos.

Nonetheless, gleaning insights into severe conflict, the denial of responsibility, and the legitimisation of bullying also raise an ethical question. Most notably, my position in many middle spaces afforded me a wide overview of competing interpretations of events. The degree of trust and closeness made participants extremely vulnerable. Comments such as “I’d prefer if you keep that to yourself” were common. So, how do we navigate ethical publishing? Feeling a sense of responsibility to the participants, retreating to the periphery could have limited my access to darker data, and I could have relied on the participants’ sensemaking and filtered stories.

Feeling inadequate was a constant companion. The point I am trying to make is that doing one’s best to serve participants and research in reflexive navigating can lead to each step feeling like a mistake. Thus, each step is dense and uncomfortable. And feeling good at one’s job seems forever out of reach.

The story above adds nuance to our conceptualisation of mistakes by highlighting elements of Trigger et al. (2012) and Fujii’s (2015) emphasis on revelatory moments. All ethnography or other types of fieldwork involve unforeseen situations, which enhances the likelihood of making mistakes. Experience in ethnography, reading several thousand pages about reflexive positioning, navigating relational claustrophobia, reflexive navigating, ethics, and micro-ethics could not prepare me for the complexity. Altogether, the intensity of revelations led to a deeper understanding of the contextual nuances being studied (Trigger et al., 2012). These findings are also an argument for not hurrying past mistakes to a silver lining. Staying with the discomfort where all navigating steps feel like mistakes could lead us to new rocky empirical ground and the corporeal aspects of life among our participants.

Concluding thoughts: how to identify mistakes

I was very naïve when I rushed into the field to carry out my first ethnographic study. Yet, planning, reading, and structure intensified over time. However, mistakes happened regardless. Dissatisfaction with limited guidance besides more reading, more planning, and more reflexivity meant that it became important to examine mistakes at a deeper level.

Using the concept of mistakes can sensitise us to the way spontaneous and dense moments can change the trajectory and understanding of a study (cf. Trigger et al. 2012). The stories above were chosen to show that some mistakes go unnoticed for a while before the consequences are revealed. This is not necessarily due to inattention but might be due to wishful thinking related to the hope of access to important participants or otherwise prohibited spaces (Burawoy, 2013). Further, going into the field with former mistakes in the back of the mind will increase attention to signs of similar mistakes. However, with this attention comes inattention to other blunders or misjudgements. For example, comparing stories one and two indicates that similar consequences can arise from different trajectories (Verbuyst and Galazka, 2023). Also, my desire to look for similar mistakes might mean that I have not discovered new ones in my ongoing research. Yet, fearing mistakes could also prevent researchers from developing intimate familiarity with participants and thus limit the areas we can research (see Matthews, 2021 for more arguments in favour of intimate familiarity). Particularly when fieldwork might be especially vulnerable to mistakes because misjudgements, misinterpretations, blunders, or errors are inherent in the complex relationships we engage in when entering an unknown context (Fujii, 2015; Stachowski, 2020).

In the end, it seems appropriate to citique the importance of reflexivity. Sometimes advertised as the “silver bullet” to coping with all our mistakes, and sometimes avoiding them altogether. Reflexivity is indeed key to rigorous ethnography, and we have important guidance from seasoned ethnographers leading our way on this subject, including O’Reilly (2012), Burawoy (2013), Benson and O’Reilly (2022), and Wacquant (2015). Their primary advice is that without reflexivity, we are bound to make several common errors. Nevertheless, the “easy answer” to our mistake is that we were not reflexive enough. However, this seems like an unquestioned cliché. Surely, there are limits to reflexive positioning, navigating, and interpretation? And surely there are limits to our methods. Reading, training through courses and supervision, and patience can, in the end, result in a similar experience to Bott (2010): ‘I had not set out with a clear idea of how these difficulties would present themselves; rather they were negotiated in a more and less ad hoc fashion’ (p. 170).

Consequently, the lesson from the mistakes presented above is that no amount of reflexivity will make us immune to the limitations of our methods or the ad hoc challenges of researching among people. Accepting that reflexivity is not a silver bullet can instead help channel mistakes into unknown paths and new rocky empirical ground.

Indeed, the mistakes I made revealed quite a bit about the context, culture, and social relations that structured observation guides, interviews, or focus groups could not. Noticing the consequences is an opportunity to think outward, backwards, and onward to attempt to understand how these moments of happenstance can deepen our understanding of how people in the local context react to unplanned events.

Altogether, the intention of this paper is not to prevent mistakes. Instead, the hope is that it can help sharpen our attention to the mistakes we make and be more systematic in capturing how these moments change the way we understand the research context. Therefore, the key thing I hope this article provides is evidence that no planning, flexibility, or reflexivity will make us immune to mistakes that arise from happenstance. I hypothesise that there are always more challenges to encounter and mistakes to make despite feeling reflexive and—at least to some degree—competent.

Potential and limitations of this article

Whatever way this paper is read is naturally based on the types of research that are culturally available at the time of reading. Current norms and the way we relate to them by way of intersecting identity markers create preferences for some narratives and discomfort at reading others. Previous research are markers of what we historically thought of as publishable commodities within their genre (Ryang, 2000). Accordingly, readers—implicitly or explicitly—use their unique knowledge and opinions to interpret and evaluate work they view as sharing common features. This academic inheritance is indicative of assumptions regarding salient markers for what an academic article is (and is not). Hence, the potential and limitations of this study depend on when, where, and how it is read.

The totality of the stories can be interpreted as a “robustness narrative” characterised by pervasive cycles of facing challenges and overcoming them (alternatively, persistence to Wacquant, 2015). In drafting this, I could have tied a nice bow on it to complete the narrative experience. To me, that would be perpetuating an overly simplistic hero’s journey. Further, there are also notions of whiteness, gender, and sexuality, which I did not explicitly point to. This provides the opportunity for the interpretation: “privileged cis-gendered white man gets away with mediocrity and still rises through the ranks”-narrative. Yet, I intend to relinquish control and let readers interpret the text from their vantage point.