Lessons from the Field: Designing and Conducting Social Work Research in Vulnerable Global Settings

Conducting social work research in vulnerable global settings often unfolds in environments shaped with ethical, logistical, and methodological challenges that are often underexplored in academic literature. These environments are often marked by political dynamics, conflicts, poverty, systemic inequality, displacement, fragile health, and limited infrastructure. These contexts challenge conventional approaches to research design, ethics, and implementation. Raising critical questions about how to do research with, rather than on communities, how to navigate shifting power dynamics, and how to produce knowledge that is both locally meaningful and globally relevant.

While the field of social work increasingly calls for decolonized and community-engaged research approaches, there remains limited practical dialogue on what it means to apply these principles in real-world global context that is often characterized in unpredictable conditions. Researchers working in humanitarian settings, conflict-affected regions, or low-resourced communities frequently face dilemmas that are not easily addressed by traditional research protocols. These include issues related to informed consent in contexts of low literacy, data access in regions where institutionalization of data repository is fundamentally different, community expectations around research benefits, gatekeeping by local authorities, managing trauma-sensitive topics, and maintaining researcher well-being in emotionally taxing environments.

Social work research highlights the necessity in recognizing power relationships and researcher positionality to conduct studies that are considered ethical and non-harmful to already vulnerable communities. Institutions like IRB committees often fail to consider the ethical and practical challenges of work in vastly different institutional and cultural contexts. Research design and ethics approvals may focus on participant protections but assume researcher safety. Discussion of positionalities within social work education and research needs to examine the complexities of insider and outsider statuses and how to navigate them in a manner that reduces risk in their respective settings.

In this roundtable, we will offer lessons and reflections from projects in cultural contexts outside of the Global North, acknowledging that they may offer new insights into conducting research in evolving political conditions worldwide. The presenters will discuss their different research approaches and the factors they consider when developing their research plans. More so, how they navigate their positionalities and local relationships of power between themselves, their participants, and institutions. We offer experiences of conducting research under authoritarian regimes in Latin America (Ruelle); designing qualitative research for ethnic minorities in the Middle East (Bader); and utilizing participatory approaches to understand public health systems and the governance of health in low-resourced settings in Africa (Imo). Finally, we will discuss strategies that can be leveraged to navigate and minimize risks to study participants and researchers alike. Our goal is to identify unique challenges but also opportunities to conduct research that is better suited to the settings in which it is conducted. The session will be especially relevant to researchers working in international development, global health and mental health systems, humanitarian aid, mass incarceration, and other areas where social work intersects with global crises.