“Are You Still in Touch With Your Participants?”: The Implications of Asking Questions About Other People’s Research

Curiosity I: What Assumptions Are Baked into the Question?

In asking “Are you still in touch with participants?” I see couched within the question the assumption that to do ‘good’ research one must continue to be in touch with participants after the official data collection period is over. Such a continued relationship, it is assumed, demonstrates that the researcher did not just use the participant and walk away. In total, the act of proving continued connection with participants is often assumed to be a preferred form of proving a researcher’s reciprocal relationship, if not being considered one of tantamount importance. I mention this not as a critique of this assumption, but simply to note the ways that maintaining connections with participants after fieldwork is often discussed as an unquestionable and unassailable sign of research project’s merits. My curiosity here leads me to consider if staying in touch is always a sign of things going right echoing Sara Childers (2012) advice to wonder how “methodological simplicity is a movement against ethical inquiry” (p. 752).

As such, built into the asking of the question is a presumption that a continued relationship with the researcher is desired by or helpful to the participant, themself. I reflect upon this because the question asked to me is always “Are you still in touch with your participants?” and not “Did the participants choose to stay in touch with you?” Beyond this implication that staying in touch is solely the researcher’s decision, I wonder if the question seems to suggest that the researcher is always considered to be in possession of something that the participant might want or need, thus reinforcing ideas researchers are always thought to be the haves and participants always the have nots. As an adult who does research with young people who occupy multiple, marginalized positions (and who do not share all the same social positionings, myself), I recognize such an assumption is based on the inherent power imbalances often found between researcher and participant. As such, it must be stated that to this day research, when done in certain ways, is part of the ongoing colonial project, especially the tendency for academic inquiries to focus on so-called marginalized groups (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Research is often framed as a mechanism to “solve” inequality or, more bluntly, as something that can “fix” things.

Educational research, as Leigh Patel (2016) clearly argues in Decolonizing Educational Research, “is often complicit in a system that normalizes the achievement and wealth of some while pathologizing and marginalizing others” (p. 26). To resist the continuing colonial project, it has become standard for researchers to demonstrate how they are countering such dynamics in their research design. Central among these efforts is finding ways for the researcher to “give back” to the participants or communities with whom they work. As such, it remains that there is a strong assumption that the participants necessarily want or might benefit from something the researcher can give to them. Moreover, it is assumed that whatever that thing may be is a thing that can even be given to the participant in the first place and, also, that the researcher is able to give that thing. Such assumptions maintain the narrative that those who participate in research projects are lacking something, something that might be alleviated through their participation in the research, thereby leaving unchallenged what Tuck and Yang (2014) call the “metanarrative of social science research.” They explain such a narrative as “research at worst is simply an expansion of common knowledge (and therefore harmless) and that research at best is problem solving (and therefore beneficial)” (pp. 243–244). With these notions unchecked, the asking of the question is seen both as harmless (because the participants’ lives are already on display and under examination) and beneficial (because the asking of the question is thought to ensure the continued care about participants’ well-being).

Such assumptions about the dynamics that play out post-fieldwork often ignore that what the participant got out of their participation might have already happened during the course of the study, that is if they wanted to get something out of it at all. Put another way, what if that which a participant got from the research during fieldwork was enough? In the case of my study, several of my participants expressed they saw my study as having the potential to impact how queer and trans youth are perceived and consented to be in the study because of their belief in my work’s potential contributions. For them, it seemed that just taking part in the study gave them something. It made them feel like they were helping to make things better for youth like them, that participating would further their own political commitments to improve conditions for others in their community. Moreover, some youth expressed quite directly that my going along with them stood to make their daily movements through the city safer. For others, I noticed while doing interviews there was something about my presence in their daily lives that they craved. That just being and talking with me seemed to provide something they needed—someone to talk to, an adult with whom they speak about certain issues, or, plain and simple, that they just seemed to enjoy my company. During one interview, Scarlet, a transman who at the time of the interview had not come out as trans, invited me to go clothes shopping with him. As we pursued the men’s section at a clothing store, he directly and indirectly suggested that because of my fashion sense and my maleness, he wanted my help picking out shirts for him to wear. Foxxy, a genderqueer participant, explained in no uncertain terms that my moving alongside them served to make their commutes on public transit safer—that my presence was sure to prevent the occurrence of gender policing they regularly experience. These are just a few examples of reciprocity that are overlooked by only measuring ethical researcher/participant relationships by the longevity of the connections that persist after fieldwork is completed.

Moreover, it might be helpful to reconsider the conversation about what I gave to participants in exchange for their participation in the study by instead asking what participants took from the research experience to better understand, or at least seek to understand, people’s reasons for participating. For what they took (or gained) may have happened without me knowing and, moreover, might not even be able to be measured, nor might it be something that I am able to describe or “prove” to anyone else. Moreover, participants may not have wanted anything else from a researcher, and they may have been content to have the relationship conclude when data collection finished. Savannah Shange (2019) explores this dynamic in her article, Black Girl Ordinary, when explaining her decision not to reach out to a participant with whom she had lost touch, even though she desired to do so. Shange wrote the following about this participant who, like herself, was a Black woman:

Perhaps here I fail as an anthropologist, and the petticoat of my disciplinary drag is showing. But I sense there is more explanatory power in [the participant’s] agentic absence, in the opacity of not-knowing, than I would find tracking her down (like a run-away) and feigning a complete circle of analysis. (p. 15)

With this in mind, I ask what other metaphorical garments are getting in the way of researchers thinking more ethically about how they are in a relationship with their participants, even when they share an identity, life experiences, or political alignment.

To be clear, I am not arguing against the idea of staying in touch with participants after fieldwork. Rather, I am asking us to consider the ways staying in touch becomes synonymous with doing good research, and to suggest that “good” is sometimes a stand-in for a way to maintain the status quo (Stewart, 2022). Instead, we might consider different questions that, I suggest, get after the root of the issue. Meaning, that if the goal is to ensure that researchers are continually holding themselves accountable to maintain ethical relationships with participants that work against colonial norms, what other questions can be asked of researchers? Such a shift might include asking researchers how they are in a relationship with their participants and the research process. In the case of my study, that might include asking: What factors might have brought youth to participate in such a project? What kept youth engaged in the study? What might they have desired from me? Did they desire me or something about me or what I represented? Exploring and wondering about these questions, even if they don’t have clear-cut answers, might give readers of my work a better sense of how I was in relation to participants during the research itself rather than how or why we continued to be in a relationship after the study if we chose to do so.

Curiosity II: What Is the Question Not Asking?

Part of my ongoing fascination with the question is that when it gets asked after I present my work, especially within academic settings, it is hard not to see the asking itself as a refusal to engage with the work being presented. In lieu of asking questions that would allow further discussion and reflection of the work, asking this one question moves the focus of the discussion of the work to something other than the work itself. The question comes at the expense of questions about the moments from my interviews that I discuss in my scholarship, the ways in which I am theorizing notions of youth, positionality, gender, race, and so on, or questions that interrogate my interview style or research design. All these issues might be better suited if the goal of a post-talk discussion is to give the audience time to learn more about the work being presented. Given that I have faced the question so frequently, I cannot help but wonder why this repeated questioning I receive after presenting my work seems to point toward a curiosity about the participants’ lives beyond the study and not with the moments of their lives about which I speak. As a result, I am left wondering what the asking of the question says not necessarily about my research, but about what an audience’s relationship to someone else’s participants can and should be. Put another way, if the question is not about the work itself, what are audiences interested in knowing when asking me if I am still in touch? Are they justified in their questioning or are they overstepping their positions and being too nosy? Am I justified in what I am framing as a refusal to seriously engage with my scholarship, or do I need to be more accommodating to this question as an inquiry into my positionality, relationship-building, and reciprocity? While I do not intend to argue that one of us—either my audience or myself—is completely in the right, I explore the dynamics surrounding the asking of the question and my own reactions to it. I want to consider what the question shows us about relationships with and to the research process.

To further this line of inquiry, I consider the question itself and its purported intentions. To begin, approaching it as a matter of fact, the question “Are you still in touch with your participants?” is a straightforward one to answer. Arguably the question has two simple responses: yes or no. Either I am still in touch with my participants, or I am not. However, it stands to reason that my offering of a one-word answer would prompt a follow-up question from the questioner or, at the very least, would be met with an unstated implication that my single-word answer is unsatisfactory.

If the answer were no, I would likely be asked to explain how and why I ceased to be in contact with the participants. As mentioned above, I understand the reasoning behind the types of follow-up questions that would ensue were I to confess to losing or breaking off contact with participants, especially fellow qualitative researchers who are concerned with the state of researcher ethics. At the very least, I would likely be expected to offer a justification for how it came to be that I ceased being in touch with them. This implicit requirement of such explanations showcases the ways that keeping in touch with one’s participants is thought of as being the correct—or at least the most ethically sound—way of doing research with other human beings. Senses of what is considered ethical in research settings should never be approached uncritically, however. As Cathie Pearce (2013) argues:

Normative frameworks for ethics address the procedural and legislate for the least-worse scenario, but a sense of ethics which is more affectively responsive requires us to pay attention to those aspects of experience which are felt, which resonate, and which work in the entanglements, especially where no obvious solution is present. (p. 465)

This underscores the importance of thinking against normative senses of research ethics to examine how and if traditional senses of right and wrong serve the goal of doing ethical educational research with youth (Childers, 2012; Loutzenheiser, 2007). Therefore, a simple response of “No, I am not in touch with my participants” would likely be met with inquisitions for further explanation to explain why I decided not to do so.

On the flip side, a simple answer confirming that I remain in contact with participants would likely be viewed as more satisfactory by the audience. However, it would probably require further elucidation as to the scope and manner of such communication—how often, through what venue, explanation of topics discussed, and so on. Whether yes or no, any one-word response to the question would likely be expected to be followed up with more information. However, given the sheer number of times I have been asked this question, I cannot help but feel that there is more baked into this question than just the desire of my audiences to ensure I am continuing to maintain ethical relationships with my participants, in whatever way they are defining the concept. It is not just within the space of academic conferences that I get asked this question—fellow scholars, you are off the hook for the moment! I have routinely been asked this question by my undergraduate students, by teachers and teachers in training, and by friends or acquaintances when I discuss my work in social settings. This shows that this question is not just a scholarly one, but a seemingly more universal one. There is some common desire to know what happened to the young people in my study that has nothing to do with ensuring I am maintaining ethical research relationships with my participants. If this is true, my wonder leads me to consider if buried in the inquiry as to whether I am still in touch is another implied question: So, what happened next to the young people? Or even: what are they all up to now? As such, I am curious if I am being asked to tell further stories about my research participants.

Curiosity III: The Methodological Implications of the Question

The previous curiosity leaves me considering the stories I tell about my research and how shifting discussions about qualitative research methodologies influence how the stories are understood. For decades, the academy has been reckoning with the assertion that neutrality in research is a fallacy, and that to better understand the lived experiences of people, especially those at society’s margins, research and researchers need to rethink the ways that validity and trustworthiness in research are assessed and determined. Almost 40 years ago, in her call to embrace the potential of “openly ideological research,” Patti Lather (1986) argued the “task is to create a body of research exemplars that will stand as testimony to the vigor that comes, not from positivist retrenchment, but from viewing the move into the postpositivist era with a sense of possibility” (p. 65). Since then, qualitative methodologists have theorized alternative ways of approaching the concept that do not lead to static ideas of what is real or valid. For instance, in forwarding the idea of transformational validity, Cho and Trent (2006):

assert that because traditional or positivist inquiry is no longer seen as an absolute means to truth in the realm of human science, alternative notions of validity should be considered to achieve social justice, deeper understandings, broader visions and other legitimate aims of qualitative research. (p. 324)

Given the mobile nature of my project where I went along with youth as they journeyed through their daily lives in NYC, to enact such shifts I made a commitment in my writing to show how the movements of my participants are the result of dynamic ways of learning to encounter, be with, and push through the city’s environs.

The interviews I did allowed me to move with the young people for the snippets of their lives they invited me to be with them. While I did nearly 50 interviews with 11 young people amounting to days’ worth of audio recordings of the interviews, for each individual participant I completed a handful of interviews that lasted one to two hours over the course of a 6-month period. The “data” that I have about each participant might seem limited in scope when compared to a more traditional ethnographic or longitudinal study. However, the goal of my work is to keep a closer, focused eye on the “everyday,” on the moments in a person’s life where, on the surface or at first glance, it seems like nothing much is happening. As a result, my analytical attention stayed focused on the so-called “small” moments of the participants’ days, things like where a youth decided to sit while riding the subway, how long they decided to stay put on a public park bench before moving along, or the decision-making process that went into how they chose to express their gender on any given day. Such a focus on storytelling allowed me to excavate moments of knowledge-making that often get overlooked by research lenses (Gabriel & Ulus, 2015; Mahoney, 2007).

What this all means for my writing or the ways in which I talk about the interviews is that the stories I tell are only ever slivers of the snippets of the youth’s lives. Of the interviews I write about or have spoken about publicly, the stories I tell about them only feature small portions of the whole interviews themselves. What audiences hear or read about each young person only represents, for instance, one short subway ride or part of a conversation that spanned a series of city blocks. Again, pulling advice from Lather (1993), “it is not a matter of looking harder or more closely, but of seeing what frames our seeing—spaces of constructed visibility and incitements to see which constitute power/knowledge” (p. 675). I am not saying that because I focus on short snippets of time I am being more thorough or precise, but that such a reframing offers a different way of making sense out of the time I spent with the people in my study. Meaning, I am trying to show the reader the lessons I have learned from and with these young people in snapshots that represent minutes if not seconds of these young people’s lives pushing back on ideas about validity in qualitative research that assume more “data” about a person’s life always leads toward more truth or accuracy.

As a result, many of the narratives I have written about the interviews start well after an interview has commenced and end while the interview is still occurring. This decision came about when I realized that if I told the story of each interview from start to finish, from when they clipped on the microphone until they took it off, it meant that I was framing the representation of the young people only based on their proximity to my own body. This made me realize that, ultimately, anything I write about the young people who took part in my study would be bookended by my presence, regardless of where I start and stop the story of each interview. It is why I frame my study as only ever being about the moments I spent with my then-participants and the things we produced as a result. I cannot write or think or speak about after the interviews ended because I was not present in those moments of the participants’ lives and, therefore, have neither the ability nor permission to share that with you.

I say all this to take us back to the question and the idea of wonder, which MacLure (2013) advises “is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect” (p. 229). I raise this purposefully to flag that part of what I am trying to do here appears to verge on speculation about the audience’s “true” motives. Instead, I ask that we frame my examination as an attempt to forward a sense of wonder. Such a stance joins calls to think against simplicity in research, like Sara Childers (2012) warning that “more positivistic desires for coherence and consistency, view qualitative inquiry as mere method, and overlook the intellectual labor and engagement with theory intrinsic to qualitative practice” (p. 752). It is with this in mind that I wonder if when I get asked if I am still in touch with participants that the asker might partially be asking for me to tell the rest of the young person’s story. That the audience wants to know what happened during the part of the interview I did not share, what happened in the day or days after, or, even, what the participant is up to now. In short, I wonder if it signals audiences’ dissatisfaction with an ending that might feel incomplete or unresolved. I say this not to make assumptions about readers’ desires, but to signal that I, too, sympathize with such feelings. I know what it is like to sit with the stories from my research and wonder what happened next. When I end the narrative of an interview by describing a participant moving down the sidewalk away from me, it is because that was the moment in which they decided to end it regardless of how many more unasked questions remained stretching out between us as they went on with their day. I suggest that the possible shared disillusionment with a lack of conclusion ties back to debates about validity. For I am committed to working toward making transparent my methodological decisions, echoing Lather’s (1993) question: “In terms of a methodology that ‘comes clean’ about how power shapes an inquiry, how do I use the disruptive devices in the text to unsettle conventional notions of the real?” (p. 685). As I did not get to control how the interviews concluded, I felt it best to represent such powerlessness in my writing. That way the reader is compelled to consider the ways in which they are making objects out of the participants, just like I had to do.

If we accept my considered suspicion above to be true, that the question contains within it a desire to know more about the stories of the participants than I have shared or that took place outside the scope of my research project, then we must next consider the ethicality and the timelines of a relationship between a researcher and a participant. Even if said desire mostly remains unstated, I think the consistency by which I get asked the question points to a palpable yearning for more information, even if no one comes out and asks for it. To be clear, I have never been directly asked (at least within academic settings) to give present-day updates about my participants. However, the implied connotations within the question I wonder about above speak to the fact that during the period I did the interviews the participants were facing various life challenges. For instance, some were trying to secure permanent housing after being unhoused, some were beginning to seek out gender-affirming health care and surgeries, and others were attempting to move from one level of schooling to another, all while trying to reckon with crushes, family disputes, institutional bureaucracies, long subway commutes, professional aspirations, and other daily life dilemmas. Because my narrativizing of these interviews depicts participants very much in the muck on some of these issues, the question likely gets asked as a way of inquiring if the participants made it through, if there has been some resolution, if things have indeed gotten better. While in the fourth curiosity I sketch out why I believe this question gets asked specifically since I work with youth participants, I explore here how the desire for more information about research participants (even if unspoken or implicit) elucidates some of the troubling assumptions about doing research and what is expected of those who participate in it.

The reason I am left with questions about what else the question might be asking is because, ultimately, I think most researchers and academics know better than to ask the quiet part aloud. There are certain ethical guidelines about doing research with human beings that people know not to cross. Adding to my curiosity, I should note that I am only ever asked the question after public presentations of my work and have never been asked this question in writing by editors or reviewers of my published work. I wonder if the space of a public presentation feels more casual, thus inviting an inquiry like the question. The conclusion to be drawn in this distinction would be that no one seems to want to write the question down on paper; even if people might be brave enough to ask it in person, it is not a question that people seem to want to be entered into the official record. Nonetheless, there is always much to learn from what is not said, from exploring what is being left unstated or implied in the question, as many scholars of qualitative research methodologies have long theorized the issue of how to account for silences in data (Cruz, 2008; Daza & Gershon, 2015; MacLure et al., 2010; Mazzei, 2004, 2007). The silence I see in the question is the implication that audiences yearn for, even if in some small way, more information about the participants in someone else’s research.

I am curious about the relationship between the reader and my work because by engaging with my work readers are seeking to evaluate the validity of what I say about the lives of young people. The reader is seeking to get a glimpse of people with whom they would otherwise have no business looking at were they to encounter them on the street in another capacity. The reader, like the researcher, is subject to powers that control and govern how close one can be to the bodies of young people; it is possible for the reader, like the researcher, to be perceived as getting too close to the young people. I wish to suggest that in engaging with other people’s work the reader is not just an evaluator of the work. Too often readers of academic contributions are solely considered to be the arbiters of a study’s merit or validity and, moreover, not part of the research process. The reader is often thought to be the external consumer; the reader watches and observes from the outside. However, I contend that the reader is an active part of this process we call research and should be brought into the necessarily complicated conversation about how validity is determined rather than just getting to claim what is valid outright. Echoing Cho and Trent (2006), we should be aiming for a “validity framework that readily touts the credibility of qualitative research so that those outside the field can understand the benefits we have and will continue to reap from multiple qualitative inquiry methods” (p. 335). Especially in a project about the production of human knowledge (what young people know) and about the production of knowledge about humans (what is known about young people), it is necessary to include the consumption of a research project as part of the way knowledge is made, it is part of the research process.

Curiosity IV: What’s Youth Got to Do With the Question?

The last curiosity I offer considers the specific context of the asking of the question when considering my research on and with youth, as hinted in the previous section. Given that I have mostly done work with youth, I cannot say with authority whether this type of question gets asked of all researchers who work with adult populations. Nevertheless, there is something to consider about the asking of the question specifically in relation to normative understandings about young people. To that end, I wonder if the frequency of the asking of the question demonstrates certain paternalistic underpinnings of how youth and young people are commonly understood in similar ways to understandings of the category of “participant.” That is, I wonder how the asking of the question, perhaps, is an attempt to ensure that, since my research involves young people, someone is still taking care of them. Because, if the answer is no (if I am not in touch with them) then the audience is left without any assurances that the youth described in my work are being cared for.

It is worth breaking down the normative social relationships that come to bear when the question gets asked, especially within the setting of a question and answer section of an academic talk. The asking suggests that the audience, the participants, and I all occupy certain positions. The participant is implied to always be at risk, the researcher is always the potential source of danger, and the asker of the question is always imbued with a sense of power derived from the normative logic of the public sphere, they are speaking on behalf of some unspecified but seemingly collective public body. That the asking comes about so frequently demonstrates the ways that those in the audience can assume a public position of protector of young people and speak on behalf of the assumed-to-be best interest of the participants/youth. Built into the asking of the question is the belief that the audience (or the public) is always in a position aligned with the shared best interest of the participant, whose young age makes their well-being a seemingly public concern. The protection of their assumed-to-innocence becomes something that the public is (supposedly) invested in protecting (Gordon, 2008). Therefore, I suggest that the asking of the question acts as a type of disciplining through a mode of public address. Meaning, that if we view the question as a way of ensuring that I, as a researcher, have taken and am still taking proper care of the young people who participated in my study, then the frequency by which it is asked suggests that asking is part of apparatus ungirding normative ideas about young people (Lesko, 2012). Namely, the supposed collective care of children and young people that permeates public conversations.

Publics, as Michael Warner (2002) reminds us, are “queer creatures . . . they exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that” (pp. 7–8). Meaning, that I get asked the question so often suggests that the asking itself is done on behalf of an inquiring public body that is supposedly universal and always administrative in a normative sense. Again, pulling on Warner, the public sphere “has been structured from the outset by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle-class, the normal” (p. 167). The asking of the question is not just coming from the individual asking the question, but because there exists a commonly held belief that there is a communal (read: public) responsibility to always be looking out to protect children and young people. In the case of research on or with young people, the researcher is always answerable to “the public,” amorphous as it may be. The researcher must always be able to justify themselves and the ways they are comporting themselves in relationship to youth participants to whomever the public appears as.

Here is where I want to draw a specific line between the way that normative protectionist ideas about young people appear in the asking of the question and the more insidious ways these same ideals are used in political and cultural conversations. Namely, the growing attacks against queer and trans adults, or any adults for that matter, who advocate for the support of queer and trans youth, the inclusion of inclusive sex education in school, the expansion of access to gender-affirming and reproductive health care for young people, and so on. Such attacks, of course, are now too frequent to count as evidenced by the seemingly unending wave of homophobic and transphobic policies aimed at young people being enacted in schools in the United States and elsewhere and the subsequent seepage of the beliefs undergirding these policies into everyday life. Given the increasingly dangerous conditions faced especially by trans and non-binary youth who are just trying to exist in schools (and more generally in public whatsoever), the key connection here is that the mounting anti-trans youth discourse in society is rooted in ideas about children having to always be innocent of anything beyond cis-heteronormative approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality. As such, espousing anti-trans and queer youth rhetoric in public is possible because such viewpoints are often masked as needing to keep children away from anything too “adult” and the ease at which social actors can voice concern for young people in the public sphere and for their concerns to gain traction.

Going back to the question, part of its asking is similarly based on these ideas. Put simply, it is easy to stand up in public and say, “Hey, what are you doing with those kids?” because social norms force collective attention to follow the question outwards in the direction of its targets rather than turning to examine who is doing the asking and why. When the question gets asked after presenting my work, the collective attention turns to me so that I might justify how I am maintaining connections with young people but never to the person in the audience who asked the question to inquire why that person wants to know more about young people with whom they have no relationship.

The reason I make this comparison between the question and larger questions that get asked about young people in the public sphere is because of the similarities to the social positionings of the categories of “youth” and “participant.” Both are commonly understood through at-risk and deficit-based lenses. They are commonly understood, through positivist paradigms, as having less agency and as needing protection. This can be seen in the fact that most studies with young people (or those under 18 years of age) often face much greater scrutiny from ethics review boards—though I echo the concerns of those who have critiqued this protectionist stance (Bradley, 2007; Swauger, 2009). It signals that young people need extra protection when they assume the already-in-need-of-protection position of “participant.” Participant, itself, is commonly assumed to be a position occupied only by marginalized populations because research has traditionally been completed on people with less social capital and clout. Being a participant frequently becomes synonymous with being someone who experiences various forms of social, cultural, or political marginalization—people whose voices have not been “heard,” people whose stories have not been “told,” or people whose experiences are foreign to or not yet understood by the “public.”

In the case of my study, the other similarity between the categories of youth and participant is that they are both temporary identifiers and all the people who took part in my study have since shed both identities. The category of youth, while murkier and more syncopated than normative senses of timekeeping often give it credit for (Furstenberg et al., 2004; Stockton, 2009), does come to an end in some way or another. Just as the participants in my study are no longer participants, they are also no longer youth. Or, at the very least, they are now over 25 years old and would be too told to take part in the study if I did it today. Therefore, since the people who once occupied the roles of participant and youth have since vacated these positions, I return to my earlier argument about the ways in which the asking of the question can be seen as a refusal to engage with my work. Attempting to ask what the former participants are up to now—even if just to inquire whether I am still in touch with them—works to keep the labels of youth and participant hanging over their heads, despite the many ways in which their lives have moved on and away from the study and any questions that one may have about it. Rather than continuing to ask the question perhaps we might find more use out of asking ourselves to think carefully about how we can better be in relationship with those whom we read about in other people’s work.

Conclusion

What these reflections about the question leave me wondering is whether we sometimes think that research can do too much. I wonder if we are perhaps treating research too preciously at times. Does the fact that staying in touch with one’s participants is thought to be the gold standard suggest that we think being a participant is such an amazing privilege? That one’s life can and must miraculously change for the better since they at some point agreed to participate in a research study. Does the wanting of researchers to stay in touch with the people who took part in their research projects keep those who were once participants stuck in a role they have already moved past?

Instead, I call on researchers and those who read the research of others to consider the ways that we might not be letting participants “grow up” or, at the very least, have a life past the one moment in time when they once agreed to take part in a research project. We should consider how the normative logics behind the asking of the question keeps those who participated in research projects from ever moving on with their lives. If I were to take the bait and respond to the question with a full accounting of what my participants’ lives have been like since the moments I interviewed them, then it would mean the people with whom I worked are beholden to the role of “participant.” The expectation of keeping in touch with participants might be seen as more about what is good for the researcher than what the people who have taken part in a study might need from the researcher or the research itself.