Inside a Multidisciplinary Grounded-Theory Project on Corruption in Ecuador: Navigating and Negotiating Challenges

Studying day-to-day corruption raises hurdles for qualitative teams that cut across methodological, emotional, and ethical domains. Rather than presenting substantive findings on corruption, this article reports a reflexive analysis of those hurdles as experienced by an eight-member, multidisciplinary research team conducting the qualitative grounded-theory phase of the CIRCLE project in Ecuador - a context where discussing corruption often triggers mistrust, discomfort, and political sensitivities. Drawing on 33 meeting minutes and eight researcher stance memos, we applied Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis to team-generated documents to examine how challenges unfolded and were negotiated. We identified three interconnected domains of difficulty. Methodological challenges included reconciling disciplinary epistemologies and balancing design flexibility with pre-specification; emotional challenges centered on self-awareness and vulnerability, rapport building and research fatigue; ethical challenges involved obtaining consent under a euphemistic study label and avoiding stereotype reinforcement. The analysis highlights how emotional currents permeated methodological and ethical decision-making and how reflexive tools, such as stance memos and scheduled debriefings, helped the team navigate these tensions. We conclude by outlining practical recommendations for multidisciplinary teams investigating a sensitive topic such as corruption and propose directions for future research on structured reflexive support and cross-cultural transferability of the challenges identified.