Leaving the Private World of Wives of Professional Athletes

Abstract

The same skills, techniques, and strategies that make fieldwork go well can keep the fieldworker in the field far longer than necessary. Interest in this irony and the exit process was prompted by dilemmas encountered by a male ethnographer in terminating his long-term fieldwork with wives of professional athletes. This reflexive account examines collaborative relationships and compulsive data collection—which proved to be essential in gathering and analyzing data—for their consequences in the leaving process. It is proposed that having a greater awareness of such methodological issues may result in constructing more realistic and less stressful exit strategies, and coping more effectively with the disruptive, emotional, or problematic nature of the disengagement process.