Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives

This article focuses on relational ethics in research with intimate others. Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Calling on her own research studies, the author examines relational ethics in ethnographies in which researchers are friends with or become friends with participants over the course of their projects. Then she examines autoethnographic narratives in which researchers include intimate others in stories focusing on their own experience. Considering ethical responsibilities to identifiable others, she discusses writing about those who are alive and those who…