Reciprocity

According to Diane Wolf, reciprocity refers to the notion that "someone other than the researcher has to benefit" from the research (Wolf 1996, p. 24). Typically interviewing is not considered in itself to carry opportunities for reciprocity. I found, however, that participants enjoyed the conversation and that some of the questions I asked encouraged them to reflect in ways they had not done before. For example, Tamara said:

I feel like, what's happened in this hour and a half is that you've really pushed me to uncover some of my assumptions about collaboration and some of my habits of disparaging the parts that go well in my research relationships and devaluing those parts and only looking at the other ones. But it deepens my reflection on when I go into another collaboration. (p. 44)

I have to admit, though, that a few years after having done the interview I found myself face to face with one participant. I made a comment about having seen her the last time during the interview. "What interview?" she asked. Clearly, each interviewee took different things from the experience.

Another, though not completely different, aspect of reciprocity is considering the community/ies who can benefit from the research. Daphne Patai (1991) calls for researchers to explore ways in which the research is returned to the community. In the case of this project, the community is the academic and other research communities. They all have access to dissertations, articles and conference papers. I certainly hope researchers who are interested in collaborative research use this dissertation. There are other ways in which this research has engaged communities in a conversation about collaboration. Within the academy, I have made several presentations discussing specific aspects of the findings. Mainly, however, I think that my research has been influential in my work as a research friend. As much as practitioners have influenced my thinking and the analysis of the data I collected, this research has influenced their work as well. I shared with them ideas I was developing and we established an ongoing conversation about those ideas. The insights I was gaining from the analysis of the data and the readings also influenced how I approached the work with the practitioners.