Drawing from my experience conducting in-depth interviews and focus groups with formerly incarcerated mothers in the United States, this article encourages qualitative researchers to consider former prisoners a vulnerable population and offers feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies as a theoretical framework for navigating the tensions research creates for former prisoners. While former prisoners possess more agency than the incarcerated, the stigma of imprisonment in combination with the race, gender, and class-based barriers they face put former prisoners at a social disadvantage. These social disadvantages, in combination with their marginalized identities, can limit former prisoners’ autonomy, impair their ability to weigh the risks of participating in research, and negatively impact their willingness to disclose their experiences during data collection. This article describes how using methods and methodologies designed to recognize participants’ vulnerabilities can help mitigate consequential challenges, such as recruiting barriers, unequal power dynamics between researchers and participants, and fostering reciprocity.
Drawing on a video-based study in a child protection context, this article explores the challenges of negotiating research access to hard-to-reach groups. It builds on traditional gatekeeping terminology in methodological discussions by identifying institutional storylines that shape access negotiations with gatekeepers, such as welfare managers and practitioners. Departing from Critical Childhood Studies and applying Positioning Theory, an analysis of the author's field notes reveals multiple institutional storylines shaping negotiations. These include storylines that address different perspectives on young people's vulnerability and need for protection, as well as storylines that reflect the complex working conditions of welfare practitioners, thereby complicating relationship-building with gatekeepers. Moreover, storylines rooted in bureaucratic concerns and formalities shape access negotiations, sometimes concealing deeper forms of resistance. Together, these interconnected institutional storylines create a fragile environment for negotiations. The findings suggest critical methodological implications, showing how institutional storylines shape access negotiations and opportunities for research participation.
Informed by the rich methodological work around humanizing and community-based research, this article unpacks our journey of understanding and conceptualizing community-driven design research in partnership with Tribal Nations. Through a multi-year critical ethnographic approach, we identified four pivots necessary to enact community-driven design research that each require a shift in current research infrastructure and systems, especially those located within universities. The pivots include shifting from power and equity to Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, from ownership to stewardship, from objectivity to relationality, and from product to process. Each pivot is an invitation to researchers to build and (re)build infrastructure that aligns with the values of community-driven design research. We join qualitative researchers who seek to center values in research by specifically discussing how this move toward community values demands a restructuring of the very foundation on which our research is built.
This study examines the effectiveness of video diaries as a methodological tool for capturing social practices in their three dimensions: materialities, competencies, and meanings. Using examples from our research on the culinary practices of young vegans in Santiago, Chile, we demonstrate how this technique provides rich, situated insights into everyday life. Our result shows that video diaries enable real-time, immersive documentation, capturing both materialities and competencies through their multimodal nature. They also foster reflexivity by disrupting routine behaviors, prompting participants to articulate the significance of their actions through a narrative process with an absent researcher. Additionally, video diaries grant agency to participants, allowing them to control their self-representation, though this also introduces performativity. Despite challenges in analysis and ethical considerations, this study highlights video diaries as a powerful tool for qualitative research, offering nuanced access to the dynamic and embodied nature of social practices across diverse contexts.
This article explores the effects of researcher pregnancy on conducting research with individuals experiencing homelessness. Using a critical reflexive approach and the existing limited research on pregnancy and fieldwork, experiences from a multi-city project using focus groups are presented. Excerpts from fieldnotes and reflections show that pregnancy has significant effects on the researcher and impacts research-participant interactions. Pregnancy can also lead to reflections of intersectionality and the interactions between faces of the researcher's identities. The researcher's visible pregnancy often helped build rapport and led to personal conversations that left participants feeling more comfortable. Positionality is key to understanding the effects of the researcher on research processes, and the discussion highlights the effects of pregnancy on these complex relationships.
In this research note, lifting from my own disaster experience, I reflect on the value of autoethnography as a disaster studies methodology. Autoethnography gives the disaster subject liberty and autonomy in decision making and creative expression. It can escape research's extractivist tendencies and power imbalances. It can also be an option for scholars from the so-called Global South, underrepresented backgrounds, and disaster-stricken contexts as they can become the very researcher/subject needing emancipation and voice. However, autoethnography in disaster research can have issues in rehearsing damage-centred scholarship, possibly espousing elite-based perspectives, and unnecessarily implicating other people who would want to be excluded from the narrative. Autoethnography must be engaged with care to be truly emancipatory.
Body mapping is a qualitative arts-based research method that can be used to explore a wide range of topics, including health, trauma, and social justice. It involves creating a visual representation of the body, often a life-sized drawing or painting, and using it as a platform to tell stories and convey meaning. In this paper, we offer our collective reflections on body mapping, borne out of our experiences with the method in six different research projects in which we aimed to engage with research questions related to embodied experiences. We first provide a brief overview of body mapping as method, and then describe our approach to collective dialogue and reflection. Subsequently, drawing on our unfolding experiences, we provide some reflections and practical advice regarding the many ethico-methodological considerations that arose in our implementation of this method pre/during/post our body mapping workshops. Lastly, we present five key factors including fallible accountability, flexibility, reciprocity, relationality, and balance for future would-be body mappers to think with when embarking upon this arts-based approach.
This article introduces the Dialogic Inquiry Interview, a novel method to explore young people's perspectives on abstract concepts, exemplified by an inquiry into well-being. Addressing ethical and epistemological challenges in youth research, this method integrates participatory principles, dialogic teaching theory and facilitation techniques from Philosophy with Children. The Dialogic Inquiry Interview emphasises mutual respect and shared authority, fostering a co-creative, dialogic and participatory interview environment. Through iterative development and practical application, the article demonstrates the method's potential to deepen participant involvement and articulate thoughts on abstract concepts, discussing strengths and limitations of this approach and highlighting ethical and methodological impacts.
Educational travel, such as study abroad programming, offers students transformative experiences, yet capturing the depth of these experiences through research can be challenging. Traditional research methods like interviews and journals often fall short in reflecting the dynamic and fluid nature of students’ journeys. This article introduces post-cards as a novel qualitative approach designed to overcome these limitations. The method leverages the nostalgia, creativity, and immediacy of postcards to encourage brief, meaningful reflections that capture key moments in students’ travels. By inviting students to engage in real-time, in situ reflection, post-cards allows for concise storytelling that conveys emotional, sensory, and cognitive aspects of the travel experience. This article outlines how the post-cards method works, demonstrates its potential to enrich understanding of student learning in study abroad contexts, and proposes it as an accessible, engaging tool for exploring both the places visited and the personal transformations students undergo during their travels. Through this approach, we aim to offer a fresh perspective on the complexities of qualitatively researching learning in educational travel and highlight its potential for capturing authentic, multifaceted student experiences.
Scholars emphasise the importance of taking positionality seriously when researching people with high socio-economic status, yet relatively few studies fully recognise the intersecting identities of both researchers and these ‘elites’. In this paper, we introduce the term ‘animated intersectionality’, which allows us to recognise the significance of identities and structural inequalities, while acknowledging individual agency and the diversity among people who share similar structural positions. This paper draws from our experience as a diverse research team exploring off-grid infrastructure transitions among elites in South Africa. We emphasise that while team members secured interviews through persistence, this work takes a toll on researchers. Expanding Sennett and Cobb’s concept of ‘hidden injury’, we explore the psychological and emotional costs of working in a hostile environment. Animated intersectionality offers a nuanced approach to understanding power, preserving the importance of identities and structural inequalities. It provides a framework to examine how power dynamics unfold in personal, contextual ways, especially in interactions between researchers and elites.
This article reflects on a feminist research project examining responses to sexual and gender-related violence in universities in Mexico's Central Altiplano region and Catalonia (Spain). Aiming to generate joint knowledge and foster dialogue across contexts, the project faced challenges in achieving a truly horizontal and participatory methodology, despite its feminist and decolonial intentions. By critically analysing our own research process, we highlight the need to reflect on power dynamics and call for a practice of ‘response-ability’ that acknowledges privilege and inequality. The article advocates for rethinking research methodologies to embrace difference, resist homogenisation and promote collaborative, feminist as well as decolonised knowledge production. Ultimately, it presents feminist research as a transformative practice that values diversity and challenges dominant, universalist narratives in academia.
While photographs have been used in popular culture for decades to capture the devastation of natural hazards, the use of visual methods as a tool to study these disasters is a less common practice. Engaging with literature on visual research methodologies and disaster recovery, this article explores the cultural and ethical challenges of using photo-elicitation to study long-term recovery efforts following the 2023 Maui fires. Drawing on interviews ( n = 31), researcher-taken photos ( n = 23), and supplemental data, including social media posts ( n = 413), we explore the ways we adapted the photo-elicitation method to account for cultural differences between the researchers and participants and how we overcame implementation challenges in the field. The examples presented in this article highlight the importance of reflexivity and flexibility when implementing visual methodologies to study hazards, crises, and disasters.
One-on-one interviews are often a rich source of qualitative data. This article examines the incorporation of a text message interviewing mode in research studies to enhance study accessibility, diversity, and respect for participant preferences. Drawing from our experience using multi-modal interviewing (phone, text, and Zoom) in a sociological study with young adults about suicidal ideation and crisis services, we present practical considerations and recommendations for offering a text messaging interviewing mode. These considerations include fostering engagement, accounting for interview length, and analyzing multi-modal data. Recommendations provide guidance on selecting the data collection mode, preparing for, and conducting text message interviews. By incorporating a text message interview option, researchers can expand the reach of studies to participants who might not have otherwise participated and increase participants’ comfort within the study. This approach may be especially beneficial for groups that prefer text communication or studies that address stigmatized topics.
As our social world is increasingly digitized, what do sociologists gain by rethinking the privileged status of in-person interviews? This paper challenges the presumption that synchronous, Zoom-mediated interviews are second-best substitutes for in-person interview methods. Drawing on data from three qualitative studies ( N = 285), we explore how digital interviews and focus groups can foster rapport, generate rich data, and meet qualitative standards of rigor. Using Social Presence Theory, we develop the metaphor of the “pocket-size ethnographer,” a smaller-than-life, two-dimensional research presence that affords unique opportunities for deep listening, reduces power asymmetries, and democratizes conversations. We argue that the diminished “realness” that researchers take on in Zoom-mediated interviews can paradoxically enhance interpretive richness, and we call for a shift from deficit-centered framings of video-mediated interviews to a quality-centric approach that foregrounds methodological flexibility, rigor, and innovation.
The international research community is paying increasing attention to inequities related to academic fieldwork in the global South. Globalisation, technological advancements, travel carbon footprint concerns and COVID-19 ramifications have made online fieldwork more viable. This has led to the rise of ‘remote collaborative fieldwork’, where Northern researchers participate online whilst Southern researchers are physically in the field. The equity implications of this model are yet to be explored. We employ a conceptual framework to assess equity dynamics associated with remote collaborative fieldwork in social sciences for Northern researchers, Southern researchers and Southern participants. We use qualitative fieldwork with Ghanaian smallholder farmers as a case study, analysing reflexive field notes and semi-structured interviews. We find that remote fieldwork does not change fundamental inequities between researchers and participants, such as extractive power dynamics, and involves various trade-offs, but may encourage the redistribution of research experience, budget allocation and decision-making towards Southern researchers.
This Note proposes the concept of preparatory participation as a way of attending to early relational and embodied engagements that shape qualitative research before and alongside moments typically recognised as fieldwork. Drawing on work undertaken with visually impaired co-participants in blue space environments, it reflects on volunteering, sighted-guide training and open-water safety certification as practices through which methodological sensibilities are cultivated. These engagements are approached not as preliminaries to research but as critical sites of methodological thinking where co-presence, sensory reflexivity and relational ethics are learned through lived practice. Situated within established traditions in ethnography, sensory methodology and critical disability studies, the Note contributes to ongoing methodological conversations by tracing how ethical and epistemological orientations are co-produced through early encounters involving access, risk and interdependence. Rather than proposing a new method, preparatory participation offers a vocabulary for recognising forms of embodied and relational labour that many researchers already undertake, and which preparatory participation helps to bring into methodological focus.
