Building Trust in Discontinuous Engagements: Researcher’s Adaptive Self-Presentation in Fieldwork Toward Deeper Penetration in Dispersed Participants

Abstract

Fieldwork with participatory methods often emphasizes continuous engagement with well-defined participant groups, in which researchers can foster trust and collect deep data from specified informants. However, some contexts involving opportunistic sampling highlight challenges of loosely connected participant groups and discontinuous interactions for which traditional snow-balling methods cannot be fully workable. To interpret how researchers effectively build trust through fragmented interactions among dispersed participants, this paper develops the perspective of Social Penetration Theory (SPT) by incorporating the lens of dynamic self-presentation and, to fill the gap of SPT’s focus on progressive and consecutive relation development through repeated interactions. Then, this paper examines researchers’ engagement with new participants through dynamic self-presentation to build trust in discontinuous social penetration processes. Based on this adapted framework, a self-reflection section draws on the author’s fieldwork on the coffee industry in Yunnan, China, and reveals how iterative adjustments based on participant feedback could facilitate engagement across varied encounters. This research emphasizes the importance of adaptive self-presentation and self-disclosure of researchers, enriching methodological insights regarding dispersed participant groups. The findings contribute to qualitative fieldwork methodology by highlighting the efficacy of strategic self-presentation in realizing discontinuous engagements, and reveal how researchers should handle ethical issues correspondingly.

Introduction

Qualitative fieldwork methods, such as participatory observation and ethnography, often rely on snow-balling sampling and continuous engagement within a clearly defined participant group (Waters, 2015). In this context, researchers explicitly know how to purposefully present themselves to win trust and collect data from specific informants (Dosek, 2021). Or rather, investigators have a specified community of participants to be engaged, for which trust is often a prerequisite before researcher-participant interactions (Hakkim, 2023), and also a usual communicative state in field engagements (Ryan & Tynen, 2020). However, in some contexts, researchers have to adopt an opportunistic sampling strategy among decentralized participants (Firdaus et al., 2024; Suri, 2011), instead of intentionally selecting targeted participants following predefined criteria or established social networks (Hâncean et al., 2025; Molina et al., 2022). In these settings, interactions are brief and demand adaptive approaches of researchers for presenting themselves, interacting with encounters, engaging in participants, and collecting data (Honigmann, 2003). Such participants are commonly not from specific communities, but are only identified by certain research themes, thereby being loosely connected within dispersed networks (Barratt & Maddox, 2016). Therefore, we should no longer understand trust as a pre-given condition before data collection, but as fragile and needing to be co-constructed through communication moments between the researcher and the researched (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004; Hakkim, 2023). Particularly, while digital technologies are further intensifying the use of opportunistic sampling in online fieldwork investigations (Kim et al., 2023), researchers have to employ flexible strategies to build trust with participants through brief interactions to confront the increasingly decentralized nature of participant groups.

Such a process of discontinuous engagement in fieldwork can be regarded as a series of interpersonal communication between the researcher and research participants, and aims to realize deeper engagement in participants by developing trustful relations. To depict this kind of communication-based engagement, this study employs a perspective from communication studies – the Social Penetration Theory (SPT) to build a conceptual framework. SPT understands relationship development as a process of gradual self-disclosure, whereby intimacy is deepened over repeated interactions (Carpenter & Greene, 2016). Typically, SPT involves the development of relations between explicit persons toward ongoing and stable relations (Pennington, 2015). In fieldwork through opportunistic sampling, the researcher has to always interact with varying participants in low frequency, and the interaction can even be only singular for most participants. Therefore, researchers must adapt their self-disclosure strategies to engage effectively with different participants, to penetrate into the broader participant group rather than individual relationships (Knobloch, 2010). This adaptation requires a flexible approach to self-presentation, allowing researchers to build trust quickly and effectively across diverse encounters.

The discontinuous nature of interactions means that researchers cannot progressively deepen trust within the same group of individuals as SPT would suggest, making the theory less applicable. To account for these nuanced contexts, this study proposes a flexible adaptation of SPT by employing dynamic self-presentation as a lens to decode the context-sensitive self-disclosure strategies adopted by researchers (Hollenbaugh, 2021). By this extension, this paper aims to build a new framework to understand how a researcher can iteratively build trust across varied participants. In this way, this new approach can enrich SPT’s scope and applicability in interpreting the relation development process in discontinuous and fragmented field contexts. Guided by such a framework, this study seeks to address the following research questions: (1) How do researchers establish trustful relations with participants in the opportunistic sampling among fragmented and discrete participant groups? (2) How can researchers transfer knowledge from previous encounters and adopt adaptive self-presentation strategies to facilitate trust-building in subsequent encounters? (3) How does discontinuous self-disclosure influence the degree of social penetration in fieldwork?

To answer the questions above and contribute to qualitative research practices, this paper presents a self-reflection on the author’s fieldwork for a human geography research project examining how globalized industries can drive socio-economic transformation in rural China. The coffee industry in Yunnan Province was selected as a case, because as a rapidly growing agricultural sector responding to China’s domestic market, the coffee industry has triggered significant socio-economic changes in local rural contexts. The goal of the research was to understand how different stakeholders, including local farmers, coffee entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and the government, have contributed to the growth of the coffee industry. When trying to access these informants, the author found that the conventional snowballing method was not workable due to these stakeholders do not have a well-defined community but only have limited connections with others through loosely connected local and digital networks. Confronted with such dispersed and scattered participants, the author had to identify ways to engage individuals without the benefit of shared social ties or prior introductions. Confined by time and logistical constraints, the author had to adopt both in-person and online interactions, and has also iteratively adjusted communication strategies based on participants’ backgrounds and the feedback from earlier engagements. Based on these efforts, the author has finally enrolled over 25 local informants into interviews. Looking back to the author’s fieldwork, a flexible approach to self-disclosure and self-presentation in line with each participant’s perceived expectations was essential to building trust among these fragmented encounters. This tough but fruitful fieldwork inspired this current paper to contribute some practical and conceptual insights for such a methodological challenge: how researchers can build rapport and gather meaningful insights when sustained immersion into participants is not feasible.

Following this introduction, the next section reviews relevant scholarship of SPT, role theory, and researchers’ self-presentation in fieldwork. The third section provides background of the Yunnan coffee industry and the methodological challenges associated with such decentralized contexts. The following section presents a self-reflective narrative on my fieldwork experience, divided into four subsections corresponding to each stage along the adaptive self-presentation process. The conclusion discusses the implications of these strategies for field methodology, offering guidance for researchers conducting opportunistic sampling in similar social settings.

Understanding Discontinuous Social Penetration in Fieldwork through Dynamic Self-Presentation

Discontinuous Social Penetration in Opportunistic Sampling Fieldwork

In understanding the process of the communication between researchers and participants in the field, SPT can present an insightful lens to unpack the gradual process of researchers’ engagement into participant groups (Carpenter & Greene, 2016). SPT is a perspective widely used in communication studies to explain the development of interpersonal relations in personal, professional, and online contexts (Brody et al., 2024; Pennington, 2021). According to the general SPT framework, relationship deepens through a process of incremental self-disclosure (Lei et al., 2023; Taylor & Altman, 1987). With a metaphor of peeling off layers of an onion, SPT depicts the relation development as also multi-layered (Low et al., 2022). Then, more inner layers of relation can represent deeper intimacy and trust between persons, and the process of deepening relationship from the surface to core layers is termed as social penetration (Brendlinger, 2019). Such penetration can be established upon an unending series of interactions whereby people gradually disclose themselves to others and build trust between each other (Mangus et al., 2020; McCarthy, 2009).

SPT encompasses dimensions to portray the breadth and depth of self-disclosure in communications (Altman et al., 1981), such as the number of personality-related topics that are covered (i.e., breadth of disclosure) (Zhang et al., 2023) and the degree to which these topics are discussed (i.e., depth of disclosure) (Vanlear Jr., 1987). Besides, paying attention to the frequency and duration of interactions, the theory also emphasizes the significance of consistent engagement for an individual to transform superficial interactions into intimate exchanges of personal information (Panos, 2014; Taylor, 1968). Provoked by these main ideas, the context of traditional participatory observation or ethnographic fieldwork can be precisely depicted as a classical process of social penetration, because of the researchers’ usual involvement in well-defined participant groups through the disclosure of researchers’ own intentions and personal information (Edirisingha et al., 2017; Forsey, 2010). Moreover, the gradually deepening engagement in participants is also a process in which researchers continuously try to establish bonded and trustful relations with the investigated community (Springwood & King, 2001). In a word, most fieldwork in qualitative research can be described as researchers’ progressive integration into participant communities, in which repeated interactions enable researchers to increase contact with local people, deepen own engagement in the communities, and finally build trust with participants to gather richer data for research purposes ¹ .

Although SPT offers valuable insights into relationship development, opportunistic sampling presents another different context which can challenge many of SPT’s basic assumptions. In fieldwork concerning communities with less clear definition (e.g., cyber communities, sub-cultural communities, and stakeholders in an extensively involved agenda), researchers may have to adopt opportunistic sampling as a crucial approach for participant identification and enrollment (Barratt & Maddox, 2016; Honigmann, 2003). Here, this paper defines opportunistic sampling as a flexible strategy used in exploring some participant communities that are loosely connected and decentralized (Czernek-Marszałek & McCabe, 2024; Patton, 2014). In such sampling process, fieldwork researchers cannot purposively enroll specific participants in predetermined sequence or structured criteria, but should capture “new opportunities that arise during the process of data collection” and adaptively make “on-the-spot sampling decisions” (Shaheen et al., 2019, p. 35). The usage of opportunistic sampling is based on dual rationales. One is that, in many contexts, participant groups are highly decentralized and dispersed, forcing the investigator to identify specific participants from potential informants with highly diversified backgrounds (Dosek, 2021; Emmel, 2013). Comparatively, another motivation is the benefit for enlarging the size of participants, because opportunistic sampling can enable researchers to enroll broader participants and collect diverse empirical evidence (Guest et al., 2006; Robinson, 2014). The dual rationales lead to a dilemma faced by researchers – the dispersed participants really bring sufficient information but also increase researchers’ difficulty in maintaining relationships with participants. Unlike other fieldwork aimed at clear sets of participants, opportunistic sampling means that researchers need to frequently approach strange people in public spaces, such as selecting passengers in city walk or opportunistically choosing internet users from online platforms. Then, researchers must conduct interviews with individuals who may never be met again (Lofland et al., 2022; Murthy, 2008; Whyte, 1993). In this way, the high temporality of these interactions will pose significant challenges on researchers in gaining trust from these first-time encounters.

The unique characteristic above, marked as discontinuous interaction, makes opportunistic sampling less liable to be accounted for by the traditional social penetration framework. In a context lacking ongoing interactions between specific individuals, the applicability of SPT principles is undermined because one cannot gradually deepen disclosure through repeated communications in most instances (Knobloch, 2010; Skjuve et al., 2023). In contrast, opportunistic sampling forces researchers to repeatedly attempt for penetration with constantly changing encounters (Feldman et al., 2003; Gobo, 2008). Although each encounter can provide a fresh opportunity to build trust, the researchers still have to always refine their approach to gaining access and developing new relations. Or rather to say, no matter how deep disclosure the researchers have achieved in earlier relations, the later encounters will have no knowledge about that and are still completely unfamiliar with researchers (Markham, 2012; Otto, 2013). Therefore, to apply SPT to the reality of opportunistic sampling, it is necessary to extend its traditional framework by adapting original assumptions. While SPT is primarily based on longitudinal and emotionally intimate relationships (Carpenter & Greene, 2016; Pennington, 2015), it is inherently limited in unpacking non-linear, iterative, and disrupted interactions. However, we have revealed that the latter scenario is the most frequent case in fragmented and discontinuous field engagements. Considering these epistemic challenges, an adapted perspective for SPT should be developed by integrating more dimensions and dynamics, to better interpret researchers’ proactive strategies in building trust across singular and brief encounters.

Dynamic Self-Presentation in Fieldwork Based on Opportunistic Sampling

In the context of opportunistic sampling, researchers need to constantly shift their focus from one participant to another. Compared to the onion model of SPT, this can be understood as the re-initiation of the self-disclosure from the outermost layer at each turn (Lei et al., 2023). However, as revealed by previous studies, experienced researchers may use experiences learnt from prior interactions to adapt their approach of communication with later participants. Such adaptation can enable researchers to bypass outer layers and more rapidly engage in deeper self-disclosure steps more efficiently with new participants (Lee & Roth, 2004; Leonardi & Treem, 2012). In this way, despite the discontinuity of opportunistic sampling, researchers can still achieve a more seamless, and smoother process of social penetration in dispersed participant groups.

Besides its inapplicability to interpret how discontinuous interactions can lead to researchers’ engagement in opportunistically sampled participants, the original framework of SPT also pays less attention to the dynamic changes in self-disclosure approaches of researchers to interacting with encounters in fieldwork (Hollenbaugh, 2021). To understand how researchers can flexibly adapt their breath and depth of disclosing themselves to fulfill the contingent demands emerged within the dispersed participant networks, it is necessary to introduce the concept of self-presentation to unpack how self-disclosure can be achieved in fieldwork (Liu et al., 2024). In Goffman’s (1959) seminal work, self-presentation is defined as the strategic management of one’s image to maintain positive impressions in the mind of other people, in order to realize certain interactional goals (Paulhus & Trapnell, 2008). This concept underpins the scholarship concerning role-switching in interpersonal communication behaviors and reveals the ability of individuals to adapt interactional styles based on specific contexts (Mazeikiene et al., 2010). Therefore, self-presentation can be an essential variable for unpacking researchers’ dynamic interaction strategies in all types of fieldwork. Particularly, by thoughtfully designing and practicing their self-presentation, researchers can realize the most suitable degree of self-disclosure and build trust with participants (Driscoll, 2021; García et al., 2020). Generally, in crafting their self-presentation, researchers can shape a variety of identities that can be tailored to different fieldwork settings, making themselves approachable to all encounters and have common topics with participants holding different perspectives (Ellis, 2007). By this means, appropriate self-presentation can create a sense of mutual rapport and reciprocity between researchers and the researched, thereby fostering researchers’ involvement in participants.

Opportunistic sampling particularly underlines the need for considering the dynamic nature of self-presentation, because researchers should constantly adjust their interactional strategies based on the feedback and responses from each new participant. In these brief and often singular encounters, trust can be operationalized and communicated by researchers through multiple manners of self-presentation, such as thoughtfully managing disclosures, designing interactional styles, and switching own roles. With which researchers can signal their trustworthiness and win new participants’ trust earlier, and realize direct social penetration in inner layers (Goopy & Kassan, 2019). This adaptability ensures a responsive and sensitive approach throughout the research process. Nevertheless, no matter how researchers switch the approaches to presenting themselves, this iterative adaptation of skills can be generally reflected as a collection and combination among several general strategies revealed by previous scholars as effective for interacting with participants. For example, selective disclosure of personal information is a key self-presentation tactic, which involves emphasizing capabilities desired by participants, shared interests, and commonalities to foster the building of trust (Goebel, 2019; McLaren, 1990). Besides, adapting language, tone, and use of jargon in line with the characteristics of participants can highlight a researcher’s professionalism and sense of belonging in certain communities, thereby helping researchers maintain engagement in participant groups (Collins & Stockton, 2022; Zou, 2023). In addition, mobilizing intermediaries is useful for enhancing the bond between researchers and participants, as participants are more receptive when introduced by trusted mediators (Bengry-Howell & Griffin, 2012; Cui, 2015).

This adaptive process actually transforms disclosure from one-directional selectivity to a two-way interaction. While researchers strategically present and disclose themselves, they are indeed constantly shaping and adjusting their dialogue styles to achieve more trustful and comfortable communication with participants (Russell, 2005). Or rather, in unstable contexts, the researcher’s disclosure is co-constructed by both the researcher and the researched, which aligns with the emphasis on “dialogical” process in the relational ethnography approach (Yeo & Dopson, 2018). Therefore, by integrating the concept of self-presentation into SPT, this paper has built a perspective that extends the linear, gradual, and consecutive framework of social penetration process. This new perspective, termed as discontinuous social penetration through dynamic self-presentation, argues that researchers can adapt their strategies across interactions, iterating experiences from previous encounters to modify their communication with subsequent participants. This cumulative learning enables researchers to build more effective and responsive communication skills, allowing social penetration to be sustained between different participants. With the framework, this paper intends to create a multifaceted and flexible penetration model that is effective in opportunistic sampling, explaining how researchers can selectively bypass outer layers of social penetration.

Ethical Issues Related to Discontinuous Engagement in Participants

As reviewed above, an instructive perspective has been developed to depict researchers’ flexible strategies in handling complex situations in opportunistic sampling. Meanwhile, this approach can significantly influence the outcomes of their investigations. The ways in which researchers present themselves, adapt their communication styles, and manage participant relationships can foster trust, ultimately affecting the richness and depth of data collected (Roulston, 2010). As researchers employ dynamic self-presentation strategies to build tighter relations, participants may share more in-depth information, or even personal opinions and private experiences (Sherif, 2001). Such bonded relations not only deepen the understanding of the social dynamics being researched, but also enrich the quality and volume of data collected.

While increased involvement yields valuable data, ethical considerations are also critical. As a frequent scenario, researchers’ adaptation of languages, tones, and self-identities can increase participants’ openness. However, if researchers failed to well balance between strategically curated self-presentation and the authentic self, it may in turn undermine the transparency of the research purpose and methods, leading to the harm of rapport (Hammett et al., 2022). For this issue, a priority ethical consideration is to maintain a certain level of detachment from the opportunistically sampled participants. As highlighted by Elias (1956), the balance between involvement and detachment is critical for the integrity of research, because excessive engagement may disturb a researcher’s judgment and lead to biased findings. A basic rule for researchers to realize suitable detachment and keep self-authenticity, is keeping open to the goal and process of the research, and showing sufficient respects to participants’ autonomy in overarching contacts with them (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), although initial interactions may involve selective disclosure. In this way, researchers can appropriately manage expectations of participants regarding the research process, duration, and potential outcomes (Takyi, 2015). Then, researchers need to remain aware of their positioning within participant groups and the potential impact of their self-presentation strategies on both their relationships with participants and the data they collect (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020). As they adapt their communication styles in different contexts, researchers should also recognize the risks of over-identification with participants, which can hinder their ability to critically analyze the information gathered (Franco & Yang, 2021).

The review above indicates that opportunistic sampling presents a unique context for social penetration, which provides an opportunity for extending the traditional framework of SPT. The discontinuous nature of interactions intensifies the need for adaptability of communication strategies and underscores the significance of self-presentation as a practical tool for researchers to realize better engagement in dispersed participant groups. By strategically adjusting their self-presentation, researchers can build trustful and bonded relations with participants in discontinuous social penetration processes, leading to more effective data collection and insightful research outcomes. Ethically, the adaptation of self-presentations may bias data and mislead the expectations of participants, and researchers must effectively balance between involvement and detachment in opportunistically sampled participants, to avoid harming research integrity.

Context: Fieldwork Among Dispersed Participant Groups in Chinese Rural Setting

For the empirical analysis of this paper, this section will reflect on the author’s experience of conducting fieldwork among a diverse and extensive population – the stakeholders of the coffee industry in Yunnan Province, China. The fieldwork aimed to probe into how this local industry can be grown under the efforts of different types of stakeholders, including coffee business owners, rural farmers, and government officials. In this fieldwork lasted from 2023 to 2024, the author flexibly employed multiple methods such as on-site participatory observation, cyber (/online) ethnography, document analysis, and semi-structured interview. In this period, the author interviewed in total 25 stakeholders by in-person or online means. Most (nearly 4/5) of these participants consisted of rural-based smallholders and entrepreneurs operating digital stores, and a minority of participants were policy actors (such as local government officials). As the key practitioners that introduced and ran the coffee industry in the villages of Yunnan, these participants (especially the business-related ones) were featured with both their expertise in the global coffee industry and involvement in the rural society. Therefore, they were enrolled into the fieldwork and provided rich information for the author’s research by answering the following interview questions: (a) why did they decide to leave the city and start new business in rural areas, (b) how did they transfer international coffee knowledge from outside world to their farms, and (c) what did they do to cooperate with local residents to externalize the profits to broader rural communities. Based on the data collected through these questions, the author used an inductive thematic analysis approach and developed codes to classify different participants’ roles, motivations, and practices in the coffee industry, thereby building an empirical base for the research project.

The enrollment of these participants brought the author significant challenges in many aspects. Primarily, the context of this fieldwork presents significant challenges of identifying specific participants due to the ambiguous categorization of targets, as the coffee business owners and other stakeholders of the coffee industry represented a broad and decentralized group rather than a unified or cohesive community (Messely et al., 2013). This barrier roots in the fragmented nature of the coffee industry stakeholders in Yunnan, where many producers operate independently or in small clusters, making it difficult to connect with or even in competing relations with other producers in the same sector (Neilson & Wang, 2019). Considering the high uncertainty and discretion of the participant group, this experience can be an instructive window to know how a researcher can mobilize different strategies in opportunistic sampling. Additionally, the diversity in the coffee industry stakeholders’ backgrounds, experiences, and their positions in the coffee production chain added complexity to this group. Even though a participant has welcomed the author warmly, the next participant might still refuse to be observed. Therefore, to engage himself in this group, the author should be sufficiently adaptable in self-presentation to win more participants’ trust. Meanwhile, the author needed effective strategies to mobilize every possible relation to identify subsequent participants and maintain long-term access. In this sense, this fieldwork significantly marked a process of discontinuous social penetration through dynamic self-presentation.

Furthermore, Yunnan is nearly 4000 km far from the author’s base region in Northeast China. As a university faculty member, the author does not have time to be immersed in the rural settings of Yunnan for extended periods to conduct on-site fieldwork, but had to rely on digital means to remotely identify and enroll participants, and the absence of regular in-person interaction further intensified the challenge of trust-building. Against this backdrop, the investigator must have the ability to adapt self-presentation while maintaining professional credibility. To enhance participants’ trust, the author, as the primary investigator, has obtained consents for audio recording before each interview and informed that all interview notes would be stored on a device accessible only to the author. Interviewees’ identifying information is only available to the primary investigator to protect participants’ privacy, and all information will be used solely for the research purpose. The primary investigator has coded the data through thematic analysis protocols, and other coauthors can only access the coded results if there is any demand of secondary use for this batch of data.

For the convenience of narrative, the next section will adopt the first-person perspective to present and analyze the fieldwork experience. The empirical materials presented in the self-reflections are drawn from the documentation of the author’s field interactions and emotional reactions recorded immediately after interviews or significant interactions with a reflexive memoing skill. These records were clustered into thematic categories and temporal stages, which mainly aimed to trace the evolution of different self-presentation strategies across phases of engagement. In this process, the author has iteratively reflected on own role among participants and the impacts on them, thereby carefully confirming how the authors’ self-presentation and self-disclosure could finally gain the trust of participants. Based on the analysis, the following narratives of the fieldwork process can be divided into four subsections (Table 1), corresponding to four temporal stages along the fieldwork period and reflecting a spectrum from initial access to retreat. For each stage, this paper will unpack several aspects related to social penetration and self-presentation. Firstly, frequency of discontinuous interaction provides the motivation for adjusting self-presentation strategies. Then, self-presentation strategy depicts the specific approaches adopted by the researcher in interacting with participants. Next, self-disclosure level examines the depth of information disclosed by the researcher, to measure the degrees of the researcher’s mutual trust with participants. Finally, penetration outcome shows how self-presentation strategies can enhance the researcher’s existence in participant groups.

Table 1.

Stages of Discontinuous Social Penetration in Fieldwork Using Opportunistic Sampling

Stages in fieldwork	Frequency of discontinuous interactions	Self-presentation strategy	Self-disclosure levels	Interaction outcome
Establishing initial access	Moderate frequency, leveraging pre-existing connections for initial interactions	Cautious self-disclosure as a coffee enthusiast and faculty member, building basic trust through shared interests	Limited, non-sensitive information centered on coffee interest	Establishing initial trust and facilitating entry into the participant group, setting groundwork for future engagement
Deepening penetration	Increased frequency, engaging with more participants online and through prior connections	Tailored communication style, gradually disclosing research objectives based on participants’ reactions	Enhanced self-disclosure with clear research intentions to foster credibility	Expanding participant base, building stronger rapport, and obtaining deeper information through adaptive presentation
Remedying interruptions	Variable frequency, adapted to participant refusals and online interactions	Adjusting self-presentation based on participant type and situation; utilizing intermediaries when possible	Consistent, flexible disclosure to maintain engagement across diverse participants	Managing fragmented participant engagement and preserving rapport by adapting presentation strategies to each encounter
Retreating from the field	Decreasing frequency as fieldwork transitions to less active engagement	Fulfilling promises, and maintaining an indirect presence	Selective disclosure, emphasizing commitment to promises	Leaving a positive legacy, sustaining relationships beyond direct engagement, and preserving future field access opportunities

Source: The author

Self-Reflection: Dynamic Strategies Toward the Penetration into the Field

In this section, several key participants will be involved to underpin the narrative of my fieldwork experience. For the convenience of showing their connections in the process of my participant enrollment, I have drawn a relation map as Figure 1, in which each participant involved has been labeled with an abbreviation. In addition, alongside the arrows linking the participants, I have added notions to indicate how each participant has been enrolled into my fieldwork. In my interaction with these key participants, I have mobilized my social identities to shape a variety of positionalities, which enabled me to flexibly shift the forms of self-presentation and self-disclosure. Firstly, as a long-time coffee consumer, I have shown my knowledge of coffee and my intention of purchasing local products, which offered me an entry point to build rapport with the participants that are coffee sellers and producers. Meanwhile, as a university faculty, my academic connection with a local college helped me approach some initial participants, and allowed me to selectively disclose my researcher identity. Furthermore, the academic connection helped me encounter a student participant who later facilitated local access, thereby indicating another positionality of a mentor and research supervisor. These overlapping identities shaped my multifaceted presence in the field and influenced how I could build trust with different participants through disclosing my identity in response to the contingently changing settings.

Figure 1.

The Relation Map Between Key Participants and the Author. Source: The Author

Establishing Initial Access on Previous Contacts

In my fieldwork, I initially encountered some individuals connected to the coffee industry in various ways — they were not deeply tied with the coffee sector in Yunnan, but were tightly associated with the broader coffee industry. As a long-time coffee enthusiast, I had established online connections with coffee practitioners, including sellers of imported coffee and fellow coffee lovers. Through my online purchases and interactions, I joined the coffee-themed conversations and expressed my interest in Yunnan coffee to many people, from whom I gathered some segmented information for my research. Nevertheless, these early encounters were not directly involved in Yunnan’s coffee production and could not help me approach the informants really involved in Yunnan’s coffee industry.

To engage in Yunnan coffee industry stakeholders, I made efforts to reach a second group of people, which consisted of some local college faculties (LCFs in Figure 1) participating in the collaboration project with my institution. While I am a faculty member in the collaborative scheme, I could participate in knowledge exchange activities with local colleges and travel to Yunnan in early 2024. During that trip, I communicated with the LCFs to share my interest in the coffee industry, and sensed that they could be key facilitators for me, because they might have connections with the local coffee producers. Keeping the purpose in my mind, I intentionally repeated to mention the topic of coffee with a blend of caution and enthusiasm during conversations with these LCFs. Specifically, I portrayed myself as a passionate coffee lover and expressed a high interest in understanding the coffee industry, but I did not disclose much about my research plan regarding Yunnan coffee. This exaggerated self-presentation with a cautious self-disclosure was for a strategic aim – I wanted to see whether they could really help me access the stakeholders in the local coffee industry, and meanwhile, I did not want to arouse their caution with my research goals in the first contact.

Then, to maintain this subtle balance, I tried to informally discuss many open topics with them, such as market trends of coffee, local coffee farms, and preferences for various coffee types. This choice of topics helped me build friendship with these LCFs and also prompted them to accept my request for directing me to a coffee production plant. Only at this time I formally started to venture into the heart of Yunnan’s coffee industry. Then, when the LCFs drove me to visit a village with some coffee producers, I got an opportunity to meet a local coffee business owner (CBO1 in Figure 1), which was a pivotal encounter for my fieldwork. Because of the introduction from the LCFs, my first contact with CBO1 was in an eased atmosphere. Thanks to this feeling of closeness during that conversation, CBO1 warmly welcomed our visit, and his attitude also encouraged me to express my excitement and eagerness to learn coffee knowledge from him. In general, my self-presentation during that visit can be characterized by enthusiasm and evident curiosity about the production process of coffee. To show respect to his generous sharing of coffee produced by his plant, I intentionally presented my interests in technologies of coffee cultivation, processing, and tastes, and also showed my awareness of CBO1’s market brand to give him a professional impression. In that meeting, I have also tried to collect some preliminary data for my research, such as how CBO1 cooperated with local villagers and transformed the profits from coffee into the development of rural communities.

The interactive approaches above allowed me to forge a positive image and shape a friendly connection with CBO1. However, when I thought I could establish a solid relation with him, I soon suffered a challenge – although he was open to talking about himself, he was hesitant to introduce other coffee producers. This business owner disclosed, although he has been conducting coffee business in the rural area for years, he, indeed, had few connections with other counterparts. Only in transactions could he touch other stakeholders, and his transactions were mainly with local farmers instead of other business owners. Furthermore, he even intentionally limited his ties to other business owners due to the competition between them. Recognizing the situation depicted by CBO1, I had no choice but to focus on himself to extract as much information as possible. Therefore, I planned to disclose my research purpose more clearly and arrange a formal interview with CBO1 for deeper information exchanges with him. In this way, despite my original intention to take CBO1 as a channel to extensive informants, I actually re-adjusted my self-presentation back to a researcher role, for the consideration of catching this only participant at that time.

As a summary, my initial access to the field has proved the feasibility of mobilizing existing contacts and relations to form my self-presentation. Until the end of this stage, I still mainly acted as a university faculty and a researcher, instead of really engaging myself in the participant group as another identity (such as a customer). Nevertheless, my cautious and enthusiastic self-disclosure has at least permitted me to keep contact with an informant that can provide useful data related to my research. Meanwhile, difficulty of expanding the participant network beyond an initial contact further illustrated the contingent nature of opportunistic sampling within a dispersed participant group. It underscores that trust-building is not linear but requires adaptability for each interaction.

Deepening Penetration through Responsive Adjustments

After initially accessing the field, I returned to my base city and shifted my fieldwork mode to online interviews. A significant challenge during this phase was identifying and enrolling subsequent participants. Reflecting on my previous in-person interaction with a coffee business owner (CBO1), I sensed that I had mainly disclosed my interests in coffee but had not thoroughly shared my research objectives. Now back in my city, I mobilized my connection with CBO1, and sometimes chatted with him through online platforms, while also occasionally purchasing products from his e-shop. In this process, I gradually strengthened my relation with CBO1 and formally invited him to a research-related online interview. In this way, I extended my self-disclosure to my study purpose, and this openness won his trust, helping me form a deeper rapport with CBO1. Consequently, he really behaved more friendly in our interview and introduced me to another coffee business owner (CBO2).

Meanwhile, to broaden my participant network further, I also mobilized online channels to contact coffee sellers on Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce platform on which many Yunnan coffee business owners established their e-shops. My first attempt was with the top-ranked coffee e-shop (TCE in Figure 1), but the process of appointing an interview was challenging. The shop’s boom meant that the owner did not handle customer affairs on his own. Instead, a rotating team of service representatives is in charge of customer inquiries. Each time I sent a message, I encountered different representatives, some of whom were unresponsive or even dismissed my greetings since I was not a purchasing customer in the conversation (even though I ever bought their products before). After several attempts, I finally encountered a receptive service representative who agreed to transfer my request to the shop owner. However, this representative asked me to formally introduce my research purposes by providing my affiliation identification and an interview outline. Finally, the owner accepted my interview after reviewing my application, and he explained that it was only because of my identity as a researcher that he agreed to spare time for an interview.

During the interview with this TCE, I employed a formal self-presentation with high courtesy, emphasizing my previous frequent purchase of his products and respect for his leading status in the coffee market. This approach of self-presentation proved effective and he behaved openly to my inquiries. In that interview with the TCE, I have comprehensively collected sufficient information concerning nearly all of my research questions, including his reason for returning to the village, his ways to share international coffee knowledge with local farmers, and the impacts of his business to the local economy. Subsequently, recognizing my limited ability to meet other local stakeholders due to distance, I seized the opportunity to ask TCE if he could introduce me to other participants. Specifically, I wanted him to introduce some coffee entrepreneurs with backgrounds different from local business owners, and he satisfied my request by introducing an overseas-returned coffee entrepreneur (ORC), which provided a non-local perspective on the rural industry. Although the help of CBO1 and TCE facilitated me to continue penetrating into my participants, I still encountered challenges because of the discontinuous nature in opportunistic sampling. For example, when I approached CBO2 and ORC, my prior connections to CBO1 and TCE did not earn their trust. The earlier participants who introduced me often shared little information about my research goals, and they had limited familiarity with me beyond our interactions. While CBO1 and TCE facilitated their introductions of me, CBO2 and ORC, as subsequent participants, required me to reintroduce my research intentions before interviews. This repeated process of re-establishing new relations necessitated my re-disclosure of my purposes and personal identity each time.

Given the busy schedules of these coffee business owners, I frequently faced their delayed responses between my initial contact and their final confirmation on the interview schedule. To tackle these interruptions, I employed varied self-presentation strategies in each follow-up message, using different reasons and carefully restating my previous information. This repetition helped reinforce my presence as a passionate customer of their business, and increased their interest in sharing their knowledge in coffee with me. Rather than progressing through deepening interactions with a single participant, my engagement in this stage relied on iterative adjustments and flexible self-presentation across multiple encounters. This iterative, layered approach reaffirms the need for dynamic self-presentation in gradually solidifying my credibility, and realizing the engagement in dispersed participant networks while keeping transparency.

Remedying interruptions with Adaptive Strategies

Despite my efforts in previous stages, my connections to the secondary participants were still loose and less helpful to my research. This limited penetration in the extended network of the local community meant that I could not ask these earlier participants to bring me subsequent contacts. To solve this problem, I again contacted the local college faculties (LCFs) to see whether they could connect me with other coffee industry stakeholders. Unfortunately, thy could not provide me any more direct links to broader groups of coffee business owners, meaning that online platforms became my only option. Therefore, I again made efforts to seek new participants through interactions with other e-shop service representatives. In this period, the nature of discontinuous penetration became more apparent and consumed much of my patience, particularly when most e-shop owners showed reluctance to interview invitations. Consequently, I often found myself stuck in a repetitive and endless cycle, in which I was always introducing myself with each contact and explaining my research intentions for multiple times. The only good news was that varied responses received from the encounters enhanced my experiences and capability in adapting my self-presentation based on the growing understanding of different participants’ reactions.

Although I initially reached some larger coffee brands similar to the top brand (TCE in Figure 1), this approach was no longer effective to all of this batch of shops. Even though I continued showing complete respect and clearly disclosing my research intentions with formal documents, some service representatives still responded indifferently or refused my request. Some did not refuse me at once, but required me to wait for their reply for a long time, finally letting me abandon the hope. Suffering from these failures, I sensed that I should not only focus on large shops. To deepen my penetration, I shifted to approach smaller brands whose customer affairs were directly handled by shop owners. As I have already accumulated sufficient coffee-related knowledge in earlier interviews, I adopted a different self-presentation in interacting with these smaller shops’ owners. When contacting them for the first time, I usually presented myself with limited disclosure of my academic identity and research purposes, but tended to emphasize my expertise in the coffee industry. While this batch of smaller shop owners were usually eager to improve their business networks based on customers’ feedback, my strategic adjustment won more trust in online interviews with smaller shop owners.

Encouraged by this success, I turned my focus back to larger shops. In repeated interactions with them, I gradually adapted my self-presentation based on previous unsuccessful experiences. For example, I avoided disclosing information that would lead to their immediate refusal. In this way, I better aligned my self-presentation with participant expectations and earned some larger shop owners’ acceptance to my interview invitations. However, this solution is only workable to participants that have reluctantly agreed to be interviewed but hesitated to offer in-depth information. Besides these “semi-open” participants, there were some encounters that explicitly expressed negative attitudes. As an example, I contacted a Yunnan-based coffee education institution (CEI in Figure 1) established by a foreign owner. Originally, I hoped this institution could offer information about the international coffee market. Unfortunately, even limited engagement was not possible as this institution did not accept any online interview. To collect international perspectives from other sources, I had to reach another international coffee trader (ICT in Figure 1) as an alternative. Although not located in Yunnan, this trader also shared some opinions that can be used for cross-verification.

Nevertheless, I must admit that such an alternative is not widely available, and I still needed to extend my network by other means. Fortunately, a local college faculty (LCF) brought me a breakthrough by recommending a student (PTS in Figure 1) applying for the part-time graduate program in my university. This student works in the local government of a city in Yunnan and has local connections to enhance my field access. Sensing the value of this intermediary, I agreed to supervise the student’s dissertation and encouraged a research focus on the coffee industry. In turn, the student could introduce me to government officials and local business owners. Through the student’s connections, I approached a local government employee (LGE) and a third coffee business owner (CBO3). These participants showed nearly no hesitation to accept my interview and provide in-depth information, and this privilege enabled me to revisit many questions unanswered by previous participants. Eventually, this adaptive use of intermediaries ultimately fostered me to achieve a deeper engagement in some new participants and gather more comprehensive data.

In this stage, I tackled many interruptions with two strategies of effective self-presentation. First, by carefully selecting participants and altering my self-disclosure based on their likely reactions, I increased the possibility of being accepted. Second, intermediaries trusted by participants helped me bridge the trust gap and made participants more receptive to me. This flexibility in participant selection and self-disclosure demonstrated the learning process of a researcher in sustaining penetration in a highly fragmented participant group through experience transferred between different encounters. Meanwhile, this stage revealed that researchers cannot always rely on a single positionality — although I kept buying products from different e-shops as a customer, some shop owners still refused to accept my interview. As a compromise, I fortunately became a supervisor and sought help from my student, indicating and re-highlighting that researchers must capture all possible chances in such fieldwork based on opportunistic sampling.

Retreating from the Field by Maintaining Access

While I have completed a significant period of fieldwork to gather data for my research, I needed to consider the issue of retreating, but my retreat from the field was not absolute. I recognized the importance of this case and adopted various measures to ensure that my engagement can be continued. During the initial fieldwork phase, I developed extensive interactions with local coffee industry stakeholders. The interviews with them enabled me, as originally a total outsider, to understand the production, marketing, and socio-economic dynamics of the coffee industry. These interactions provided rich evidence into the Yunnan coffee sector, and helped me finish a case study paper (to be published at present), and I have also learnt that the upgrading was still ongoing for the coffee industry of Yunnan. This inspired me to track this case for the long run instead of keeping doing fieldwork at present, especially when 25 interviews have already been conducted. Meanwhile, another (or the most important) rationale underpinning my retreating decision was that interviews no longer yielded novel insights. As suggested by Guest et al. (2006) concerning sample size in fieldwork, for research that aims “to understand common perceptions and experiences among a group of relatively homogeneous individuals, twelve interviews should suffice” (Guest et al., 2006, p. 79). Although the communities of coffee industry stakeholders are fragmented, they were actually not diverse in their roles and backgrounds because of the common conditions required by the coffee industry. In this sense, recurring patterns have frequently emerged when I coded notes of the 24th and 25th interviews, and the analysis results have been sufficient for my research to build a perspective interpreting stakeholders’ interplays in the coffee industry. This indicated a theoretical saturation for my research and justified my withdrawal from intensive field immersion.

To sustain my subsequent investigation after the first phase of fieldwork, I continued leveraging digital means and kept in-time communication with the part-time research graduate student (the PTS in Figure 1). As noted in the 3rd subsection (Remedying interruptions), I reached a consensus with this student to write the dissertation concerning the Yunnan coffee industry. Therefore, at the time when I had to finish my first-stage fieldwork, I assigned the student to identify other valuable topics related to the Yunnan coffee industry for writing a dissertation. As an example, I suggested the student focus on local government departments’ actions to externalize the benefits of the coffee industry into the development of rural economy and the improvement of rural social environments. In this way, the student must continue fieldwork among the coffee industry stakeholders and can perform a mediator for me, helping me indirectly keep a penetration into my previous participants and enabling me to re-access the field anytime I want.

Another issue for my retreat was completing my promises to my participants. A basic commitment was buying their products, which was fully fulfilled by myself, evidenced by the large proportion of Yunnan coffee in my recent coffee consumption. In addition, during my interviews with coffee business owners, I promised to convey the concerns and suggestions of coffee business owners to relevant authorities. After drafting my research paper, I also wrote some policy recommendations for the local government of Yunnan as a by-product of my research. These policy suggestions focus on supporting local farmers and firms, improving infrastructure, and creating more favorable conditions for specialty coffee production. With this effort, I could fulfill my commitment to positively impact the industry beyond academic outcomes.

It is essential to acknowledge that my relationship with the initial group of participants has transformed. While I am no longer in the active researcher role, I have built relationships that extended beyond pure academic interest. Many of the participants now view me as a friend or advisor rather than just a researcher. Although I have paused my intense, day-to-day engagement of my original fieldwork, I continued being involved in the Yunnan coffee industry through ongoing communication, research collaborations, and supporting the work of my graduate student. In this intricate form of retreat, I have transitioned from a researcher to a more familiar and daily member within the coffee stakeholders’ community. My ongoing involvement, characterized by a blend of friendship, advisory, and academic roles, allows me to maintain connections while exploring new insights from the coffee industry. This dual status enhances my understanding of the field, and in this sense, my retreat does not signify a complete withdrawal but rather a strategic repositioning within the evolving landscape of my field context.

This complex retreating process once again illustrates the difficulty to balance between involvement and detachment. As a researcher, my continuous presence in the field evolved from a direct to an indirect form, which reflects my adaptive strategies to maintain engagement with a necessary distance. This balance helps ensure my research’s objectivity and ethical integrity, and also enables me to keep trustful and lasting relations with my participants. For ethical considerations, maintaining involvement after the initial fieldwork phase requires me to fulfill both academic and personal commitments. With my fulfillment of promises, I have respected my ethical responsibility of contributing positively to the community. Based on these efforts, my intricate retreat became a continuation instead of a termination of my fieldwork.

Conclusion

As the scholarship of qualitative research methods generally discusses fieldwork with explicit participant groups, less attention has been paid to researchers’ engagement in opportunistically sampled participants. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on the context of discontinuous interactions with dispersed encounters in fieldwork, and conceptualizes researchers’ strategies with a theory of communication studies – the Social Penetration Theory (SPT). This theory traditionally focuses on continuous and progressive relationship-building through repeated communications between specific persons. By revisiting dynamic self-presentation strategies of researchers in previous fieldwork, this paper develops a perspective of discontinuous social penetration through dynamic self-presentation, to demonstrate how researchers can iteratively adjust their interactional tactics to confront the fragmented nature of opportunistic sampling. Particularly, this perspective argues that researchers can sustain trust-building among dispersed participants by adapting self-disclosure degrees based on past encounters’ reactions. This extension of SPT can help understand researchers’ flexible strategies in realizing engagement in fieldwork featured with dispersed participant networks.

To verify the conceptual framework and examine the specific strategies adopted by researchers in field engagement, this paper subsequently reflects on the author’s fieldwork regarding the coffee industry stakeholders in Yunnan, China, which illustrates the employment of adaptive self-presentation in line with the personal characteristics of different encounters. Particularly, the author cumulatively enhanced adaptability to the nuances of participants based on the feedback and reactions learnt from past interactions. Through iterative reassessment and adjustment of self-presentation manners, the author managed to adopt suitable degrees of self-disclosure to effectively penetrate into participant groups and built trust in both on-site and online contexts. This approach underscores the researcher’s ability to build connections despite brief and singular interactions, revealing how adaptive strategies can consolidate dispersed engagements into cohesive participant networks. Moreover, the author’s utilization of digital technologies particularly marked the ongoing intensification of cyber ethnography methods nowadays, which highlighted the importance of taking precise skills to engage in participant groups only through low-frequency interactions.

The reflection on the author’s practice, as a window showcasing a specific researchers’ strategies in opportunistic sampling, contributes practical skills and conceptual development to the debates of fieldwork methodologies for qualitative research. Some adaptive strategies, such as self-disclosure in line with participants’ expectations, the use of digital channels, and the trust-building through intermediaries, can be employed by researchers to engage with other dispersed groups where sustained rapport-building is not feasible, such as hard-to-reach populations or digital communities. However, the skills of self-presentation and the degrees of self-disclosure detailed in this paper reflect situational strategies utilized in response to specific challenges, rather than being universally applicable. For example, although the use of intermediaries and e-commerce platforms facilitated the data collection process, availability of intermediating persons severely depends on researchers’ personal connections, and not all participant communities have the same capability to access online platforms like Chinese coffee industry stakeholders. Therefore, the occasionality of these strategies underscored a significant challenge of generalizing the findings of this study – opportunistic sampling is highly uncontrollable with unexpectable situations, where researchers must constantly adapt their strategies in each new encounter, often limiting the opportunity for researchers to form consistent approaches of self-presentation. After all, while these skills presented in this paper cannot cover researchers’ behaviors across all fieldwork contexts, this study still highlights an opposite scenario to the regular fieldwork among well-defined communities, thereby contributing to the discussions of adaptive practices in response to the discontinuous nature of participant engagement.

Moving toward a broader understanding of adaptive strategies, a cross-context typology might need to be developed in a similar form of the four involvement levels in participatory methods (Ruane, 2005), thereby identifying, categorizing and defining some universally applicable self-presentation approaches. Such a typology would help generalize adaptive practices highlighted in this study, and allow researchers to better tailor their approaches to specific field settings. Furthermore, future research could follow the typology to contribute detailed guidelines for managing self-presentation and ethical boundaries. In the long run, such studies would enrich our understanding of adaptive fieldwork methodologies, contributing to a broader toolkit for researchers operating in varied and challenging contexts. However, this paper, as a reflection on a single period of fieldwork, cannot provide such a universal model of engagement, but can still perform a pilot to provoke further inquiry into fieldwork marked by fragmented participant groups and discontinuous relations. Finally, as an emphasis on the ethical issues, the author in this paper fulfilled commitments beyond academic inquiry when retreating from the field. However, it is a fact that researchers may use diversified expedient approaches, such as making promises, to effectively penetrate into dispersed participant networks. The accumulation of uncommitted promises may hinder the further engagement of researchers in the community. In this sense, the ongoing engagement requires careful balance between academic objectivity and ethical responsibility to the community.