The same skills, techniques, and strategies that make fieldwork go well can keep the fieldworker in the field far longer than necessary. Interest in this irony and the exit process was prompted by dilemmas encountered by a male ethnographer in terminating his long-term fieldwork with wives of professional athletes. This reflexive account examines collaborative relationships and compulsive data collection—which proved to be essential in gathering and analyzing data—for their consequences in the leaving process. It is proposed that having a greater awareness of such methodological issues may result in constructing more realistic and less stressful exit strategies, and coping more effectively with the disruptive, emotional, or problematic nature of the disengagement process.

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During field research on wives of professional athletes, several of the wives seemed to find that the in-depth interviews had a therapeutic value. Indeed, they themselves often referred to the interview sessions as "therapy sessions," opportunities to unload suppressed feelings, innermost thoughts, and private experiences in ways that led to certain self-transformations. This article examines the nature of collaborative relationships in the interviewing process and factors that enabled some of the wives to experience a cathartic process of self-revelation and an introspective process of self-discovery, thereby gaining more from their participation than they had expected.In doing qualitative research, we are naturally concerned with the process of gathering data. But in our quest for knowledge, in our effort to refine our methods, and in our attempt to deal with problems in the field, we often overlook how the fieldwork process is defined and experienced by those we study. What do they gain from participating in our qualitative studies, and what can we learn from their perceptions of that process?My interest in these questions arose during my field research on wives of professional athletes: Many constantly and clearly referred to our in-depth interviews as "therapy." With the passage of time in the field, I became aware of the different but consistent ways in which they regarded our interview sessions as "therapy sessions." This serendipitous development was puzzling

In this reflexive account of a neglected aspect of cross-gender fieldwork, a male sociologist examines his use of the “right” masculinity in long-term fieldwork with wives of professional athletes. The gender and impression management strategy of “muted masculinity” was applied as a method to avoid the hegemonic masculinity these wives dislike. The ethnographic strategy is identified and examined by evaluating its characteristics and the part it played in developing collaborative relationships, conducting sequential interviews, establishing rapport and trust, becoming regarded as a male expert, and gaining acceptance into the wives’ private world. Although a male fieldworker’s gender can become a complicated issue in a female world, it is proposed that an outsider strategy can be constructed and applied in ways that benefit the fieldwork and the researched.

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, this article provides valuable insight into the power and control processes that emerge from the work/family issues of professional athletes and their wives. It examines from the wives' perspective how these husbands engage in the interrelated processes of gender work and "control work" in their marital relationships and how wives respond. The "spoiled athlete syndrome" is introduced and discussed within the context of a typology of control work. As processes of learning, cultivating, and exerting control, this syndrome begins with early male, sport, and power-control socialization and continues through occupational socialization. This article seeks to explore the possible consequences and implications of such "control management" by husbands who have learned to define the male self and sport involvement as aspects of a hegemonic masculinity and how such definitions affect their wives and marriages.