The role of development worker is a highly political one, and the research on which this article is based explored how such workers negotiated some of the ethical challenges of the job. The research adopted a methodology that, whilst psychoanalytically inspired, was also congruent with the democratic values and experiences of those who were being researched. The authors argue that the validity of the psycho-social method to some extent hangs on the capacity of the researcher to share his or her thinking with the interviewees and involve them in a joint process of sense-making. This is an important methodological innovation given that psycho-social approaches are sometimes criticised for being top-down.