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From the ethnographers' side: escaping rocks and pitfalls in swinger research

Margaret J. Vaynman (University of Granada, Granada, Spain)
J. Tuomas Harviainen (Tampere University, Tampere, Finland)

Journal of Organizational Ethnography

ISSN: 2046-6749

Article publication date: 18 May 2023

Issue publication date: 24 July 2023

87

Abstract

Purpose

This paper presents a model for organizational ethnographers that wish to find new methodological approaches for the study of swingers and other marginalized groups that deal with potential social stigma and form communities around the lifestyles of swingers and other groups.

Design/methodology/approach

An ethnographic, qualitative study was conducted by (first author) in Spain and France using the methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, Russian, English and French with 40 members of the studied scenes.

Findings

The authors claim that through wise participation, using ethnographer's positionality, communicating with the ethics review board throughout the project and skillful writing about this group, the authors can create a foundation for future ethnographies inside this subculture.

Originality/value

Very few ethnographers reported on being in the field as participants, even as novice swingers, and how the positionality of ethnographers and the embodied ethnography can contribute to understanding swinger settings. Even fewer ethnographers addressed the contradictory sides of permission from their ethics board to study swinger settings and the implications of this for data collection.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants without whom this study would not have been possible. The authors would like to thank Dr Katherine Frank for the insightful comments that helped restructure, rewrite and polish an early version of this article. We are deeply grateful to the two reviewers for their thorough and considerate comments that helped improve the final version of this paper.

Funding: This research project was partially funded by the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund.

Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The second author did not participate in any of the reported fieldwork but has participated in the analysis of the pre-anonymized data and in the writing of the article.

Contribution: All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by Margaret J. Vaynman. Analysis was performed by Margaret J. Vaynman and Dr J. Tuomas Harviainen. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Margaret J. Vaynman, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

External research funder: This research was partially funded by the Norwegian State Educational Fund. This funder did not follow the research in any way while requiring only that the researcher submit one document from the university about each year's progress. From study design to submission, the researcher solely answered to the University of Granada, including the ethics board, the committee and the advisor, without communicating anything to the funder.

Erratum: It has come to the attention of the publisher that the article, Vaynman, M.J. and Harviainen, J.T. (2023), “From the ethnographers’ side: escaping rocks and pitfalls in swinger research”, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-03-2023-0007, failed to remove anonymisation features during the typesetting process.

On pages two and three it was stated [first author] and [second author], this has been amended to Margaret J. Vaynman and J. Tuomas Harviainen.

This error has now been corrected in the online version. The publisher sincerely apologises for this error and for any inconvenience caused.

Citation

Vaynman, M.J. and Harviainen, J.T. (2023), "From the ethnographers' side: escaping rocks and pitfalls in swinger research", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 181-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-03-2023-0007

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited

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