Researching in collaboration: a guide to successful partnership

Having been invited to present a conference paper on the experiences of working in a collaborative research team ( 1 ), we discovered that there was very little in the way of published advice for would-be researchers on developing a research partnership. Confronted with this lack of authoritative guidance we were forced into a reflexive exploration of our own collective experiences of engaging in research. This in itself became a process of self examination and disclosure, through which a number of principles evolved that we could identify as inherent in our working relationship. This paper examines those principles within the context of our current research, opening up for discussion the possibility that such principles could be applied to other research situations in relation to the dynamics of the research team and the process of project management.