The focus of this article is to support researchers-developers who wish to ensure the rigorous operationalization of their methodological approach to Research & Development (R&D) when using an interpretive or participatory qualitative approach. A literature review of a corpus of 121 references was sorted to select 31 methodological writings on interpretative and participatory qualitative research. This final corpus was subjected to an analytic questioning analysis (Paillé & Mucchelli, 2021), which identified three major sensitive areas involving risks and tensions in these types of approaches to R&D methodology. In order to deal with these sensitive areas while ensuring the scientific rigour of the R&D approach, eight precautions are suggested.