Why Qualitative Research about Media Activism Could be Hard?

Abstract

This article discusses the challenges the researcher often encounter when they conduct qualitative research. The data were collected through in-depth interviews with a sample of researchers who did their qualitative research about media activism in Egypt between 2008 and 2018. In this context, media activism is a broad term to include new media, digital media and community media. Egypt was selected for this article as the case of the global south, where the research field is politically unstable, and the results may apply other countries of the global south. The article concludes that there are three main variables to determine the difficulty of completing a qualitative research; the identity of the researcher or the research team; the time of carrying out the research and the connections between the researcher and participants.