ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

Back to Overview of Sessions

Session Details

Survey methodology provides best practices for rigorous designs, yet fieldwork does not always unfold as planned. This is especially true in difficult research environments: institutional settings such as prisons and hospitals, conflict-affected and remote regions, and studies of hard-to-survey populations (Tourangeau et al., 2014), including groups that are hard to sample, identify, reach, persuade, or interview. In such settings, guidance about sampling frames, contact protocols, and interviewing conditions can break down. Gatekeepers control access to frames and respondents, layering institutional consent over individual consent and constraining mode choices. Surveys may be administered without privacy, or in emotionally charged circumstances, threatening measurement through social desirability pressures and interviewer effects, while restricted access threatens representation through coverage and nonresponse error. These challenges also fall on the people collecting the data. Fieldwork in difficult environments imposes emotional labour on interviewers and researchers (Waters et al. 2020), with consequences that are methodological as well as ethical: interviewer burden, attrition, and effects on data quality. This session examines how researchers can adapt to the realities of difficult fields while maintaining methodological rigour, with field adaptation as a key design principle. We invite contributions addressing, among others, negotiating access and working with gatekeepers; sampling and recruitment of hard-to-survey populations; mode constraints and measurement quality in institutional or insecure settings; interviewer training, safety and wellbeing, and ethical review in constrained environments. Contributions from all survey contexts are welcome, including institutional settings (e.g., prisons), humanitarian and conflict settings, and surveys of stigmatised or mobile populations.