Worldwide travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly changed the norms of
conducting qualitative research. Online interviews, long regarded as a second choice to
their offline counterparts, are no longer seen as supplementary since they emerged as the
dominant mode of data collection during the pandemic. This study employs an
autoethnographic approach to investigate the authors’ experiences of adjusting to
alternative methodological approaches. The investigation critically reflects on how the
author’s agencies in allocating and gathering instructional, social, and economic
resources led to a researcher identity reconfigured by choices in making ethical
commitment in data collection. This article also sheds light on how the authors,
constrained by limited resources, gained better understanding of ethics in practice
through negotiation with participants and obtained rich data by exercising their agencies.
The article argues that researchers need to place both online and offline methods on equal
footing to facilitate a more ethically sensitive approach to data collection.