Anticipating that university training might have an influence on how interviewees thought of collaborative research, I attempted to reach interviewees who had not been formally trained by universities to do research. Two researchers were suggested but they were too busy and declined the invitation to be interviewed. The one researcher with no university research training I was able to interview was also very busy but, as is often the case, agreed to be interviewed as a favour to my supervisor. These details may be pointing at a limitation of the data in the sense that I may have reached only certain participants. My academic location as a doctoral student and specific work in community may have created barriers to accessing many community-based researchers. How much of a limitation this is is hard to assess because I could not find any reliable source of information that would detail how many researchers with no academic training are working in the community.

Description of participants

Rich descriptions of individual participants serve at least three goals. First, they contextualize the data, defining for the audience as well as for the researcher who provided the data the results are based on. In this sense, the descriptions need to include more than demographic information to fully frame the data. Second, a rich description of participants points at an acknowledgment of the complexities of human experiences and understandings. A few characteristics of a person cannot fully depict who the person is and what s/he brings to the research. Third, rich description can offer an opportunity for participants to be recognized for their contributions to the study.

In some projects, rich descriptions can be as detailed as possible without risking giving away the identity of the interviewees. In this project, however, such a detailed description would give away details about participants that may identify them. Limited by these challenges, the following paragraphs present short descriptions of each participant and a brief explanation of the types of research projects they described in their interviews.

Out of the twelve participants, eight were women working in the university, in centres of excellence, in community-based organizations and in unions. All of the women described themselves as feminist and said that their work was feminist. The four men I interviewed worked in non-university settings. Two of them, although not currently involved in doing research, worked at agencies that in one way or another funded and disseminated research. Out of the twelve participants, ten were Caucasian. The twelve ranged in age between 35 and 55. I have given all interviewees pseudonyms.