Building Trust in Discontinuous Engagements: Researcher’s Adaptive Self-Presentation in Fieldwork Toward Deeper Penetration in Dispersed Participants

Fieldwork with participatory methods often emphasizes continuous engagement with well-defined participant groups, in which researchers can foster trust and collect deep data from specified informants. However, some contexts involving opportunistic sampling highlight challenges of loosely connected participant groups and discontinuous interactions for which traditional snow-balling methods cannot be fully workable. To interpret how researchers effectively build trust through fragmented interactions among dispersed participants, this paper develops the perspective of Social Penetration Theory (SPT) by incorporating the lens of dynamic self-presentation and, to fill the gap of SPT’s focus on progressive and consecutive relation development through repeated interactions. Then, this paper examines researchers’ engagement with new participants through dynamic self-presentation to build trust in discontinuous social penetration processes. Based on this adapted framework, a self-reflection section draws on the author’s fieldwork on the coffee industry in Yunnan, China, and reveals how iterative adjustments based on participant feedback could facilitate engagement across varied encounters. This research emphasizes the importance of adaptive self-presentation and self-disclosure of researchers, enriching methodological insights regarding dispersed participant groups. The findings contribute to qualitative fieldwork methodology by highlighting the efficacy of strategic self-presentation in realizing discontinuous engagements, and reveal how researchers should handle ethical issues correspondingly.