Relationships with participants have been named as key to accessing the field. Good relations between researcher and participants are considered to be crucial in ‘doing ethnography’, defining the quality both of the data and of the whole ethnographic research process. During fieldwork researchers are typically investing a lot in building and maintaining confidential relations. In our paper we will discuss fieldwork as ‘people work’ – the practical, ethical and epistemological questions connected to the process of building research relations. We will use examples and experiences of doing fieldwork in schools from our three separate ethnographic projects. Our paper builds on our discussions of doing 'people work'. These discussions have led us to rethink how we ethnographers think about the connections in between field relations, data and knowledge: how good and close relations are considered as precondition to producing good data and of gaining access to cultural knowledge – to getting ‘in’ and ‘deep’. Our paper asks what kind of field relations do we need to ‘access’ cultural knowledge, how ‘close’ or ‘deep’ do we have to get to ‘know’ – and how we ethnographers negotiate with the taken for granted ideals of ‘getting in/close/deep’ in our ethnographic projects.