Abstract

There is an increased reliance, since COVID-19, on online methods in qualitative research for participant recruitment and data collection. While online methods have some clear advantages, they have also raised ‘new’ concerns about fraudulent participation in qualitative research that can hamper research rigour. Drawing on a case study of two of our own UK-based projects which investigated intersections of health, sexuality, and social connections during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper critically examines the challenges posed by terms like "imposter” and “fraudulent” participants and suggests instead the use of "suspected participants" to acknowledge the researchers' role in judging if participants are authentic or not. We argue for a reflexive epistemology that questions normative assumptions about authentic participation and advocate an inclusive but separate analysis of suspect data as an interpretive tool that ca enhance rigour, rather rejecting such data as a problem that needs ‘screening out’.

Rights

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Cite as

Heaphy, B., Yodovich, N., Atherton, S., Merchant, A. & Garcia-Iglesias, J. 2025, 'Imposter participants? Towards a reflexive epistemology of ‘suspected participants’', International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 24. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069251335497

Downloadable citations

Download HTML citationHTML Download BIB citationBIB Download RIS citationRIS
Last updated: 16 May 2025
Was this page helpful?