Qualitative health researchers immerse themselves in the settings that they are studying and this results in personal interaction with research participants. As a consequence of this immersion the boundaries between the researcher and the group of people under study can easily become ‘blurred’. While many authors make fleeting references to some of the boundary issues they have experienced in their research (Birch & Miller, 2000; Campbell, 2002; Etherington, 1996; Gilbert, 2001a; Hutchinson & Wilson, 1994), very few have specifically examined the boundaries that arise for researchers and how they handle them. In this chapter we focus on the boundary issues inherent in sensitive research including boundaries between researcher/friend, researcher and counsellor/therapist and self/other. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the implications of poor boundary management for researchers and outline some strategies that might be useful to researchers when managing these boundaries.

Defining boundaries

The term ‘boundary’ is used widely in the published literature, with most references to ‘boundary blurring’ found in clinical areas including counselling, psychotherapy, nursing and medicine. In very general terms the word boundary implies the determining of some type of limit or distance between persons (Scopelliti et al., 2004).