Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Online Qualitative Research With Vulnerable Populations In The Philippines: Ethical And Methodological Challenges During Covid-19, Vincen Gregory Yu, Jhaki Mendoza, Gideon Lasco

Development Studies Faculty Publications

Our article draws on two multi-sited studies to present the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting online qualitative research among vulnerable populations in the Philippines—specifically, among people who use drugs—during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the global scholarship has long articulated the difficulties inherent to pursuing research on such populations, we show how the specific milieu of the Philippines in the last three years has created exceptional, structural challenges to the conduct of said research. Besides the inevitable migration to online fieldwork brought about by the pandemic, researchers have had to contend with the continuing sociopolitical and existential threat to vulnerable …