Collaborators, Intermediaries and Gatekeepers: Doing Research Remotely in Bangladesh

In this paper, the author discusses her experience as a foreign researcher organising a face-to-face survey in a remote Bangladeshi village with the help of a Bangladeshi research assistant based in Australia and a community participant recruited and trained as surveyor. She discusses problems encountered during the conduct of the survey and argues that these problems are indicative of the different research paradigms adopted by the research team. Whereas the author approached the research within an interpretivist paradigm and was interested in understanding the participants’ stories, the research assistant and the surveyor understood the research within a positivist paradigm and were focused on discovering the “truth”. These problems illustrate the difficulty of doing research remotely with collaborators, intermediaries and translators who may have different understandings of what doing research encompasses and what is ethically appropriate.