Tillmann converts friendship from a background condition of fieldwork into an explicit qualitative method. Her central proposition is that friendship and fieldwork share relational operations: gaining entrée, negotiating roles, learning codes, participating, observing participation, managing intimacy and eventually confronting departure or loss. Friendship as method therefore requires research to proceed with the practices, pace, natural contexts and ethic of friendship rather than treating relational proximity as contamination. The theoretical contribution is interpretivist and critical: reality is understood as plural and interactionally constructed, while estrangement and neutrality are refused as automatic guarantees of rigour. Methodologically, the approach demands radical reflexivity because the researcher’s commitments, vulnerabilities and privileges become part of the field rather than external conditions. Its wider bridge is to feminist methodology, relational ethics and insider research. Friendship produces forms of access and mutual knowledge unavailable to short encounters, but precisely for that reason it raises the ethical stakes and makes accountability inseparable from relationship.