Studying summer farming and farm dairies in Sweden and Norway – the shared empirical basis of this essay – using methods that require a close proximity between the researcher and the researched can be a challenge. This is especially obvious when the studied community is subjected to frequent studies conducted by scholars and authorities. It became even more complicated as the researchers had different roles in the three projects discussed in this text. In project one, researchers developed knowledge together with summer farmers, in project two the research group interacted with the summer farmers while implementing the UN Convention on Biological Diversity on behalf of the Swedish government and in project three researchers addressed summer farmers as respondents. It is our experience that research in which interaction with respondents is close often becomes a target of critique by other scholars who claim that this type of research is incapable of producing valid and impartial knowledge due to suspected bias. In this article we discuss five types of ethical challenges met in the three projects, two of which are based on a community-based participatory research approach (CBPR) and one on a case study approach (CS). Starting off, from previous literature, we compare ethical dilemmas in both CBPR and CS with the help of the following concepts: creation of partnerships, participation and perceptions of truth, sources of conflicts and mistrust and the consequences of such research for quality, reliability and research integrity. Our research questions are: What are the ethical, practical, methodological, and scientific challenges and implications of research conducted in close proximity to informants? What can the research community learn from such experiences?

Results indicate that the case study approach (CS) may create power imbalances between the researcher and the informants which need to be addressed, as such projects not only risk replicating a negative and urban-based view of rural respondents, but can also lead to poorer results, i.e. poorer quality and lower reliability of results. The use of CBPR empowers respondents and their knowledge, but does little to prevent conflicts and power imbalances within the studied community, and may also lead to low reliability and, more generally, poor quality of research. One lesson from this article is that developing an ex-ante strategy to cope with potential conflicts is fruitful and can generate better results. In addition, the experiences from these three projects and the comparison between them indicate that research can win from several perspectives if an ethical strategy is developed early and weaved into the project as part of the research strategy and the research questions. Close proximity helps to formulate more practically relevant research questions and contributes to a more interdisciplinary interpretation of results and conclusions.