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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the problems and potential of conducting ethnographic research among people with ideologies that are opposed by the researcher and the importance of reflexivity in confronting ethical issues at the field site.

This paper is a reflective account of the author’s ethnographic fieldwork, during which the author studied Chinese fatherhood in Hong Kong. The author chose a men’s center as a primary field site but later found that the men held views on gender and family to which the author was opposed. Neither remaining silent nor confronting the men was an option. The author was concerned that the informants would interpret the silence as agreement with their views and would then accuse the author of deception when they read the later publications.

Being reflexive of the positionality as a young research student in the research milieu allowed the author to come up with a passively active approach to tackle the situation. The author shared own experiences or stories that the author had heard and asked if a feminist interpretation of an issue would be a better alternative. This approach not only solved the ethical risk of deception but also provided possibilities to acquire data that provided deeper insight.

This paper argues that bureaucratic ethical guidelines are not enough to yield ethical ethnography because ethnographic research involves intense human interactions and complex ethical issues specific to the research milieu. Rather, an ethnographer’s being self-reflexive is the key to an ethical ethnographic research.

This paper presents an approach inspired by the Functional Grammar (fg) of S.C. Dik, which has been rethought to adapt it to the context of automatic analysis of bureaucratic documents. The research is part of a larger ongoing project for the automated processing of land registry documents and the model presented has been demonstrated for automatic content analysis of documents concerning technical operations of real estate (division and regrouping of lots) and is to be extended also to mortgages. The first paragraphs examine the theoretical principles of the application; the process of understanding the document content through the production of predications is then presented and the content analysis strategy briefly sketched.