Political Science Educator: volume 29, issue 1
Reflections
By Cristina Juverdeanu (c.juverdeanu@qmul.ac.uk)
I teach an advanced qualitative methods course and, as most modules of the kind, it focuses on key concerns one should be aware of when dealing with human participants: the principle of no harm, risk assessment, informed consent, confidentiality, and anonymity. These are principles I apply to my own research on vulnerable migrants.
Having the two hats on made me aware of a key challenge in teaching and researching vulnerability. On the one hand, it is vital to emphasize vulnerability to allow students and future researchers to take all necessary precautions when conducting fieldwork. On the other hand, the practical experience on the ground often highlights how labelling some of these individuals as ‘vulnerable’ can actually deny them the voices we often seek to uncover through our research. Hence, the challenge I have been grappling with is finding the right balance between how to teach interviewing the most vulnerable without rendering them more vulnerable.
I start my Research Ethics class by exposing students to the Stanford Experiment. Exploring what went wrong in the experiment, from the incomplete consent form to the long-lasting trauma inflicted on the participants, allows me to then branch out and tackle the importance of identifying vulnerability and designing research at the highest ethical standards. In class, we talk about guiding principles such as no harm and about conducting risk assessments and allowing for the possibility that a study should not go ahead if the risk is too high for the participant or researcher. We use a gradient to gauge the severity and likelihood of risks, and weather they are acceptable, acceptable with mitigation, or not acceptable at all. Finally, we delve into the commitment to protect vulnerable participants and the importance of adopting trauma-informed approaches and designing distress protocols.
Trauma-informed approaches to data collection require identifying the vulnerable populations that are likely to have experienced trauma in order to mitigate the risks during data collection. The danger is that participants will revisit and relive difficult memories. As Malhotra et al (2023) explain, it is vital to adopt trauma-informed approaches to prioritize the participant’s safety and avoid re-traumatization. Moreover, distress protocols are a must. The designing of such protocols—following, for instance, the template set forth by Whitney and Evered (2022)—is a particularly useful exercise for students to reflect on the different triggering points for reliving the trauma, mapping them, and offering breathers or ways out at every step throughout an interview.
There are very real and palpable risks of doing harm when vulnerability is not correctly identified. My current fieldwork with vulnerable participants concerns immigrant victims of domestic abuse, where failure to identify and mitigate risks (for instance, by creating safe spaces for conducting the interview) can lead to the victim of domestic abuse being unable to cover their tracks, potentially being followed by the perpetrator, with a real risk for their safety and even life. Consequently, I find it vital to teach students and future researchers how to identify vulnerability and design appropriate protocols for it.
At the same time, labelling highly vulnerable participants as such runs the risk of rendering them even more vulnerable by denying them agency. There is no single definition of vulnerability (Thummapol et al. 2019) and a precise definition would be problematic (Liamputtong 2007). Nonetheless, for methodological purposes, Moore and Miller (1999: 1034) use a definition of vulnerable people as those who ‘lack the ability to make personal life choices, to make personal decisions, to maintain independence, and to self-determine’. This definition is precisely what is often contradicted by findings on the ground, as vulnerable individuals often make personal choices and maintain agency despite the adverse circumstances.
There are epistemic choices when presenting vulnerable participants as victims, and difficult calls to be made. Presenting such participants as victims entails several drawbacks. First, it denies them the capacity to reject the label. In my own research on vulnerable immigrant women victims of domestic abuse, I came across many stories of empowerment. Some of these ‘vulnerable’ immigrant women have not only fought and challenged the system but also empowered others to do the same. I have heard stories of how women on precarious immigration statuses have not only supported entire families but have also knocked on other women’s doors empowering them to consider leaving domestic abusers, inviting them to join language classes, societies, and women’s rights groups. Second, and deriving from the above, the collective labelling as victims hides not only the variety of roles women assume, but also the diversity of intersectional identities within the group. Some women might identify more than others as victims. For some, it might be a source of catharsis, while for others it might be offensive. So, it is not only the denial of the opportunity to reject the label (and the generalization of the label) but also the act of rendering them invisible in the process.
Among the objectives of interviewing such vulnerable populations are understanding their stories, and often, also attempting to give voice to the voiceless. But the very label reinforces their vulnerability and further obscures their stories. Meanwhile, when teaching about how to include such vulnerable participants, I often struggle to strike a balance between instilling in students an understanding of the importance of fully recognizing participants’ vulnerability, while also ensuring they do not deny agency to participants or further render them invisible.. The challenge becomes how to teach taking vulnerability seriously while not reducing participants to this label. On the one hand, students and researchers must reflect on the need to identify vulnerable populations for the purpose of upholding the highest ethical standards. They must comply with enhanced requirements and protocols as requested by university ethics boards. On the other hand, they need to be critical and reflexive towards the implications coming from attaching this label.
This requires a return to the basic question that precedes the fieldwork: why are we doing it? If the purpose of this kind of research is to access ‘hidden populations’ (Melrose 2002), then we should not forget that our objective, when appropriate, can be to render them more visible, not less. In doing so, researchers want to give voice, to reject imposed labels, and to allow stories of empowerment to emerge.
My two hats as a teacher and practitioner of qualitative research methods have taught me of the value of living with the two competing demands and of the need to make students aware of them. Reflecting on the imposition of labels is part of the critical thinking we seek to instill in students, and it is only fitting that it should be part of our methods training too.
References
Liamputtong, P. 2007. “The sensitive researcher: introduction to researching vulnerable people.” In The Sensitive researcher: Introduction to researching vulnerable people, 1-22. SAGE Publications.
Malhotra, G., Machado, S., & Aslam, G. 2023. Trauma-Informed Approaches to Data Collection. EnCompass LLC. https://encompassworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Trauma-Informed-Approaches-to-Data-Collection_Jun2023.pdf (Accessed January 2025).
Melrose, M. 2002. “Labour pains: Some considerations on the difficulties of researching juvenile prostitution.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 5(4): 333-351.
Moore, L. W., & Miller, M. 1999. “Initiating research with doubly vulnerable populations.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 30(5): 1034-1040.
Thummapol, O., Park, T., Jackson, M., & Barton, S. 2019. “Methodological challenges faced in doing research with vulnerable women: Reflections from fieldwork experiences.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18.
Whitney, C., & Evered, J. A. 2022. “The Qualitative Research Distress Protocol: A Participant-Centered Tool for Navigating Distress During Data Collection.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 21.
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Cristina Juverdeanu is a lecturer in politics and international politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. As part of APSA’s mission to support political science education across the discipline, APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Please visit APSA Educate’s Political Science Educator digital collection.
Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
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