Doing Research in a Pandemic

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations, such as displaced Syrians in the Middle East, current movement restrictions also pose logistical and ethical challenges to fieldwork-based means of conducting research within these communities.

Utilising our team’s extensive network of researchers across the Middle East, From the Field adopted a unique, remote research methodology, combining a quantitative household survey with remote visual ethnography in the form of “digital food diaries” from our Syrian participants.

Conducting research during a pandemic was a huge adaptation for our research team, bringing new emotional and practical challenges, as well as new opportunities to connect with our research participants. Below, a few of From the Field team members reflect on this unconventional research experience, which mostly took place in our homes.

Maria Azar, Interviewer

I was pleased when Joy first contacted me to work together for this project. I believe that it was also important to be more than ‘a person doing the work’ since the stories that we heard from the participants were, at some times overwhelming to hear. Working as a team helped alleviate the intensity of the raw emotion that was delivered to us.

Coordinating interviews and payment with participants went smoothly. We were greeted with ‘good vibes’ and generosity in sharing information.

People wanted to talk and have someone to listen to them. All participants understood that we were contacting them to fill out a survey, and still felt the need to share their story, what they are going through and the challenges they were facing, just for the sake of talking.

Our voices were our means of communication, the tonality, the silence, and the sounds in the background. When interviewing a woman we heard a fight going on next to her, she had to finish with us and look after her family before contacting us again. A man spoke to us, with  his wife talking and cooking by his side. Another participant had a sleepy voice and a desperate tone. A woman talked fast, worried that she’d miss any valuable information she wanted us to know about. A man kept answering with jokes and laughs, pushing me to laugh with him… For a few, continuity after the survey was important. They kept sending a rose, a picture or a voice, just saying hi.

Some participants expressed feeling grateful and comfortable talking to us which made me personally feel grateful. When working on research, the researcher is left with a lot of information, with little we can do. For instance, some asked for medical help, others financial, etc., and this is where we are confronted with the limitations of this work.

Joy and I also had a routine when working together, from making tea or coffee to sharing food whether at my place or hers to cooking dishes from vegetables and fruits from our gardens. Sharing this experience left us with reflections on the Lebanese crisis, the place of the refugees, the needs assessment that is proved to be lacking in some regions, the nature of the questions of this survey, etc.

All in all, gratefulness was the most expressed feeling coming from the participants and us researchers as well. 

Lisa Boden, Principal Investigator

This photo is a snapshot of my workspace in my kitchen. I took a photo of my keyboard, because it’s only 3 years old and I ’ve already worn down the letters in an entirely predictable way.

I included my lists because I make lists about lists in order to cope with the sheer volume of operational tasks that come in on a daily basis to make sure everything gets done.

I live in this space - a small corner of my kitchen at the table we usually use for eating -sitting on a fairly ordinary but uncomfortable bench from 4:30 or 5:00 am until about 8 or 9 at night at least - every day. The world is both big and very small -and our computers are the only portal to reach it. So I feel lucky to have this.

This period during the pandemic has made me very reflective about what it is like for our Syrian academic colleagues who can move only under certain restrictions, which are far more heart-wrenching than one can imagine, and are imposed without any promise of release.

Joy Abi-habib, Interviewer

My Desk After the Data Collection 

Distant payments and catering to each participant’s phone provider rates, phone plan and preferred method of payment…

The logistics behind participant payment is much more complicated when you are relying on a distant payment method and adapting to each participant’s request, within the possible options offered in a time of social distancing. The Lebanon team was happy to encourage small businesses and vendors by buying phone cards from them.

The Perks of Teamwork and Reflecting with a Fellow Interviewer

The entire process was made much richer and easier by working with a fellow researcher, who is also familiar with the context.

We spent a lot of time, discussing and reflecting on our work. Analysing the cultural and economic context in which we were also living, and our position is this entire initiative.

We also often shared a meal together and snacked during our long work days … this made us reflect even more on the topic of food insecurity and be more conscious of all the disparities, injustice as well as the changes that we were observing around us.

This reflection also allowed us to be sensible to daily struggles of most vulnerable groups that were vividly illustrated through all the stories shared. It also allowed me to be mindful of the perceived significance of this research for both the participants and the multidisciplinary research team.

Lebanon is going through an unprecedented economic (and political) crisis and the topic of food insecurity has been surrounding us in the media, in our direct environment, and in the research we are contributing to.

It has been very humbling and emotional to listen to the hardships and challenges experienced by the participants. It was difficult to be unable to offer additional help.

Nonetheless, the gratitude of participants was always kindly and gracefully expressed regarding the university’s compensation for participation and any referral offered… 

The Research Topic is very Relevant to the Context (Perhaps too Relevant?) 

As a Lebanese researcher, It is very important for me to contribute to the team’s efforts and share my understanding, experience and expertise from the context to further inform the research study. The Lebanon team is also well aware of the additional challenges faced by the Syrian refugee community who are particularly vulnerable in the context of the current Lebanese economic crisis that has left all residents on the Lebanese territory facing extreme poverty, food insecurity and hunger.

Mackenzie Klema, Research Assistant

Going into my master’s programme, I was eager to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation. So when COVID-19 hit, I was initially devastated to learn that I was going to have to do my entire research project from behind a computer screen. But working on From the Field has a tremendous experience that has showed the ups and downs of conducting research from afar.

On one hand, doing remote interviews and receiving digital food diaries during this pandemic has given our team a new type of access to the “field”: we have received video footage from rural agricultural areas and from active conflict zones inside northern Syria—places where researchers could not normally travel even before the pandemic.

Furthermore, the digital food diaries gave a new role to our research participants. Traditional ethnographic research usually consists of foreign researchers going to distant places and recording their observations. So ethnography is often quite Eurocentric. But because we could not travel to the Middle East during COVID-19, we relied on our research participants to share windows into their lives.

The food diaries allowed participants to only show what they felt comfortable showing with us, but this also has its limitations in terms of what we were able to learn. I am curious as I look through the food diaries about what lies beyond the edges of the frame. What are we not seeing? What we see in the diaries are active choices made by the participants about what to share and what to leave out. All research is always partial, but with remote research we must recognize that our understanding may be even more partial.

Conducting research from afar was also a personal challenge for me in terms of self-discipline and motivation. I am extroverted and like going into the “field” or the office. Working from home for the first time, I struggled. I felt lonely at times, going days sometimes without seeing a real person. My eyesight got worse looking at the computer all the time. I recognize my privilege in that these were the worst impacts I faced from the pandemic. Through it all, I’m glad that I had the support of a truly diverse and passionate team of colleagues to keep me going.