PurposeThis article aims to set a roadmap for an ethical programme, which we call “qualitative migration research ethics” (QMRE). It is a scoping review that maps current ethical challenges that migration scholars often face and provide guidance, while acknowledging the fact that many researchers deal with ethical issues on a case-by-case basis.Design/methodology/approachBy connecting three lines of debates – ethics in social sciences, in qualitative research and in migration studies – this article addresses the following core questions: What are the particular ethical dilemmas in qualitative migration research (QMR)? How do migration researchers deal with these ethical dilemmas? What is the role of universal ethical codes of conduct and case-by-case ethical considerations in dealing with particular situations?FindingsThis review demonstrates that special aspects of migration research context, e.g. participants' mobility, potential vulnerability and migration as a politicized issue as well as the flexible and exploratory nature of qualitative research require particular ethical awareness that cannot be sufficiently addressed by standardized guidelines.Originality/valueIt proposes that efforts to raise ethical awareness must go beyond researchers' ethical confessions or blind adherence to pre-fixed guidance. Researchers must have critical “ethical radar” before, during and after their fieldwork; not only while working on extreme and vulnerable cases but also while doing all kind of research regardless of the level of vulnerability. Last but not least, this article claims the need for including critical ethical consciousness substantially in higher education programmes at the very beginning of the research career.
Migration is not only transforming sending, transit, and receiving countries, but also social scientific studies. The expansions of human mobility, profound demographic transformations, and their diverse social, political and economic consequences have brought unprecedented theoretical and empirical attention to the phenomenon. While migration research has relatively longer and more established tradition in US academia, its growth in European scholarship in the last three decades has been remarkable. An increasing number of scholars and journals devote their work to understanding causes and consequences, current situations, changes and continuities of migration-related issues in Europe. Moreover, the expansion of research centres and networks, undergraduate and graduate programs, conference meetings, winter and summer schools demonstrate increasing institutional visibility of migration research. For instance, IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion) The publication is particularly addressed to graduate and post-graduate students and, more generally, to those who embark on the task of doing qualitative research for the first time in the field of immigration. It is also addressed to more senior researchers who are interested in strengthening their competence in the use of qualitative methods, specifically applied to the study of migration processes. In a nutshell, each chapter provides the readers with a set of substantial reflections that we hope will guide them in dealing with the particular aspects of qualitative research when applied to migration studies. While covering different stages and topics of migration research, each author explores when and why a particular dimension of qualitative research becomes key to migration questions; how it adopts different logics, designs, and techniques; what kind of theoretical, epistemological, empirical, and ethical challenges researchers in this field face; and how these challenges can be addressed, and possibly lessened or at least controlled.This edited volume is primarily concerned with the issues of qualitative methodology and its diverse research techniques in migration studies. The central focus neither assumes a hierarchy among different methodological traditions nor carries any intention of unilaterally imposing norms of one methodological tradition over others. In other words, qualitative methodology neither can be seen as inherently superior to other methodological traditions nor as a "last resort" technique when statistical methods are not appropriate (Mahoney 2007, p. 122). What current research shows is that scientific excellence and academic development go hand in hand with the use of diverse methodological tools, approaches, and designs. In this respect, we acknowledge the complementarity of different methodological paradigms that vary in terms of their strengths and limitations, and appreciate the efforts of multi-method collaborations.Yet, we also believe that qualitative research has a particular importance for migration stu...
The unprecedented demographic transformations due to global human mobility and its multifaceted social, political, and economic consequences in both countries of reception and origin, have motivated an increase of interest in having reliable information and deeper knowledge about migratory patterns and the subsequent accommodation of diversity issues both by policymakers and scholars. This is especially true considering that there is a general consensus that this phenomenon is a long-term trend of our more recent history, and it is featured by being complex and unpredictable while giving rise to a permanent atmosphere of uncertainty. We need methodological tools for increasing the understanding of our basic questions on why people move, why they move to certain countries rather than others, what we can do about forced migrants’ vulnerable situations, and how we can link cohesion and diversity, human rights, and security, and a long list of issues and frameworks that shape migration studies today. To have a universal toolkit for producing knowledge is almost a naive request. What we have learned after several decades of research is that migration research needs to be sited and contextualised (King, 2018), and always placed within a given process (Zapata-Barrero, 2018). Most migration-related problems have to do with how people perceive them and behave accordingly, rather than having objective value-free understandings. In other words, migration research is mostly about interpretations rather than facts. Hence, there is an importance to digging into a methodological technique that has a particular role in producing knowledge by analysing how people, institutions, and governments interpret human mobility and diversity dynamics.
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