Proximity and positionality: Situating knowledge through the experiences of quantitative air quality data collectors working in participants’ homes

Data collection is a vital part of the research process, and those who conduct this work play a foundational role in shaping research. Despite this, the experiences and perspectives of frontline data collectors are often left underexamined by research teams and in wider literature. This paper presents the findings of a reflexive, qualitative study of 10 fieldworkers from a research project examining indoor air quality and childhood asthma in London, where multi-method quantitative data collection was undertaken in the homes of 110 participating households. Throughout, this paper underscores how fieldworkers’ positionalities influence both the emotional intensities of data collections and the production of knowledge. It examines the epistemic opportunities for research teams that can be gained from attuning to fieldworkers’ insights. Through attuning to place, this paper underscores the significance of the research setting, focusing here on the home-based data collection. This is considered with reference to the fields of environmental health, exposure science, and public health, where the growing interest in indoor ecologies and the intersection of housing and health necessitates an appraisal of home-based quantitative data collection.