Getting to the heart of the matter: making meaning--three challenges for family researchers

This article explores three of the challenges that qualitative researchers face when working in the family health and well-being field. It is based on the authors' experiences of an ongoing research program that involves research in a human services organization and a family-focused community study. The authors discuss three challenges in the context of this experience and highlight the ways in which they have resolved them within this research program. The first challenge centers on forming research questions. The second challenge concerns access and reciprocity. The final challenge involves research partnerships and teams. Partnerships can take many different forms and hold much potential in qualitative research. Participants can become research partners, or they can maintain more traditional roles as providers of information. Deciding which role participants should have and how to manage the resultant relationships become important tasks in qualitative research because of the intense levels of involvement that often characterize these sorts of research programs.