Penciling, a technique used to anonymize images for both human and machine vision, offers an opportunity to reduce technical traceability and retain visual data for online and social media research contexts. Drawing on methods for creating composite narrative and visual accounts to preserve participant anonymity, penciling enables researchers to…

Cost-effective and user-friendly, mobile phone-assisted methods have remained underutilized in qualitative social science research. The scarce methodological guidance, together with recruitment and ethical challenges, has arguably stifled advancements in this area. COVID-19 exposed the need to better equip researchers with the expertise and tools…

Conducting field research with a vulnerable population is difficult under the most auspicious conditions, and these difficulties only increase during a pandemic. Here, we describe the practical challenges and ethical considerations surrounding a recent data collection effort with a high-risk population during the COVID-19 pandemic. We detail our…

Not knowing the population size is a common problem in data-limited contexts. Drawing on work in Sierra Leone, this short take outlines a four-step solution to this problem: (1) estimate the population size using expert interviews; (2) verify estimates using interviews with participants sampled; (3) triangulate using secondary data; and (4)…

Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align…

Leveraging ground-breaking work of Black feminist scholars alongside established techniques of focus group and community-based participatory research, we explain sister-girl talk as a novel method for collecting and analyzing group interview data with Black women. We outline the procedures for consultation, facilitation and preliminary analysis of…