Navigating Complexity: Qualitative Research in Challenging Field Settings - Online

This course is designed to familiarize students and researchers with various facets of qualitative research, particularly focusing on challenging fieldwork environments involving complex and intimate inquiries, expansive research scopes and diverse participant types. We will draw on our personal experience of undertaking ethnographic work and collecting semi-structured interviews with adults and children, presenting examples from the field to illustrate key challenges. The course will particularly benefit researchers engaging in qualitative research with vulnerable communities for short-term periods and in international contexts.

This course will discuss:

• Making sense of the field: As researchers working on sensitive issues and with families living in precarious conditions, how can one effectively understand and document the field (space, participants, communities and surroundings)? How can we make decisions about community engagement in research while recognizing that our participants are part of existing networks and communities? How can our research ensure that voices are heard without causing harm or disruption to people’s daily lives and social structures? How does our definition of the boundaries of a ‘community’ influence how we define and include community/peer researchers? Further, do we concentrate on noticeable elements that define the field for us, or should we pay attention to aspects that may not be prominent to us but hold significance for the participants? What leads us to make these decisions? Likewise, in informal discussions when new subthemes of our primary research objective emerge, what strategies can we employ to capture the evolving field effectively. 

• Working with ‘vulnerable’ participants: How can we define vulnerability in a way that respects participants’ right to participate and be heard but also attends to situated realities? How do you interact with participants who are traditionally seen as vulnerable, considering both the environment they live in and the potential vulnerability their involvement in the research might entail?

  • Research with children

  • Researching daily wage labourers in factory settings

  • Navigating the complexities of posing tough questions in qualitative research

• Locating researcher and participant vulnerabilities in qualitative research: While participants may be structurally vulnerable and situated in precarious circumstances, it is likely that both researchers and participants will encounter additional vulnerabilities during the research process. How should these challenges be managed and navigated as the research progresses?

  • Managing unanticipated challenges during fieldwork

  • Understanding and iteratively addressing multi-layered power dynamics in working with community/peer researchers

• Ethics as an ongoing process in qualitative research: How does one navigate ethical dilemmas in the field while collecting data and later representing participants’ and their experiences in academic writing? How does one continue to maintain ethical rigour throughout the research and beyond the application process?

  • Navigating positionality constraints in short-term field research

  • Adopting inclusive research practices

  • Praxis-oriented reflexive research

  • Adopting more collaborative methods, including working with community/peer researchers

By the end of the course participants will:

• Understand key challenges and ethical considerations in qualitative research
• Be able to articulate their own positionality and why it might matter during fieldwork
• Have a nuanced view of how to define a ‘vulnerable’ group and understand the methodological and ethical challenges while working with such groups
• Understand what a praxis-oriented, reflexive approach entails
• Understand how local contexts might shape participants’ understandings
• Be able to identify non-disruptive community engagement strategies
• Identify benefits and challenges of working with community/peer researchers
• Be able to identify some of the unique considerations involved in international research
• Acquire essential insights into the challenges and experiences of working with children

This course is aimed at students, researchers and academics in the social sciences with little or no training in qualitative methods.

The course will run from 11:00-16:00 and equates to one teaching day for payment purposes.

Course Description

Provisional Programme

Day 1:

11: 00 – 11: 15: Introduction and course outline

11:15 – 12:00: Overview of our fieldwork experience

12:00 – 12: 30: Group Breakout

12: 30 – 13.00: Break

13.00 – 13.30: Thinking through ethics before during and after fieldwork 

13.30 – 14.00: Lunch

14.00 – 15.00: Defining and grappling with ‘vulnerability’

15:00 – 16:00: Interactive Workshop

Day 2:

11.00 – 12.00: Moving towards a reflexive praxis-oriented approach

12:00 – 12:15: Group Breakout and Discussion 

12.15 – 12.30: Break

12.30 – 13.30: Participant and interviewer discomfort with sensitive questions 

13.30 – 14.00: Lunch

14.00 – 15.00: Responding to unanticipated challenges

15.00 – 15.15: Break

15:15 – 16.00: Discussion, Evaluations & wrap-up