Methodological and ethical challenges of the ‘family map’ technique in researching LGBTQ+ families: Insights from the field

Abstract

This article explores the analytical and ethical potential of the family map as a situated visual method within immersive ethnography conducted with LGBTQ+ families in Poland. Based on 30 days of fieldwork in 21 households, the study integrated the family map interview into a broader ethnographic design to examine how kinship is defined, practised, and affectively experienced in conditions of legal precarity. When embedded in sustained ethnographic relations, the family map can elicit moments of emotional intensity, hesitation, and rupture, revealing affective tensions and deferred recognition. Two stepfamily case studies show how emotional closeness coexisted with partial visibility and normative constraints, especially for social parents. What remained unspoken or excluded from the maps often exposed the deepest kinship ambivalences. Our research contributes to ethnographic methodology by showing how relational visual tools can reveal the affective and ethical complexity of intimate life under conditions of marginalisation. The mapping interview functioned not only as a mode of elicitation, but as a situated, ethically charged encounter that shaped both participants’ self-definitions and the researchers’ role in the field.