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Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaIn his inaugural address, Schutte (1983) drew attention to the negative imagethat researchers may have, particularly when they are involved with crossculturalresearch in South Africa. Not only do language and culturaldifferences contribute to the fact that the (White) researcher is regarded assuspect by the (Black) participant, but the socio-political situation also plays apart.On the every-day level of communication he (researcher) is much morereadily perceived as the informer attempting to gain access to insideinformation. He is almost comparable to the ‘enemy within the gates’, asMayer defined the witch, as somebody who becomes familiar with theinternal matters of a group but who maintains outside affiliations andloyalties. Black communities have become used to the informer, and thereare various ways of keeping him happy by feeding him bogus‘information’. Similarly our researcher runs the risk that professionalinterests he intends to serve may not be recognized in the light of thesubjects’ past experiences. Rather his activities may be regarded as thoseof some official serving the interests, not of professional social research,but those of the state apparatus or some bureaucracy (1983: 10)The examples that we have discussed have all related to fairly generalperceptions of the researcher as a suspect or stranger. At a considerably lowerlevel Brislin et al. (1973) use the term rudeness as an all-embracing term torefer to the researcher as someone who interrupts the normal activities of therespondents. It is, however, evident that a variety of issues, like the affiliationof the researchers, their interests, cultural background, and the time and placeof the research all contribute to the image of the researchers: the positive ornegative perception that the participants are likely to have of them.(iii)Distance between researcher and participantRather than discuss researcher and participant characteristics separately, wewill pay attention to the manner in which differences between the researcherand the participant may result in negative consequences in the context ofobservation.A large body of research has been conducted in an attempt to establish whicheffects result from differences between the researcher and the participant. Insome of the most important findings, the existence of racial effects, gendereffects, status effects, urban-rural effects, and even styles of dress effects havebeen indicated. We shall pay some attention to a few of these studies.In a recent study Campbell (1981) found race-of-interviewer effects similar tothose found in earlier studies by Hatchet and Schuman (1974) and also byHyman (1954). His final assessment of the situation was that racial differencesbetween the interviewer and the participant result in a significant degree ofbias. These biases are, however, limited to those items in which the race83