This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Belousov, K. Articles by Pentsov, D. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Any port in a storm: fieldwork difficulties in dangerous and crisis-ridden settings

Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg,

Tom Horlick-Jones

Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Horlick-JonesT{at}Cardiff.ac.uk

Michael Bloor

Centre for Drug Misuse Research, University of Glasgow,

Yakov Gilinskiy

Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg,

Valentin Golbert

Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg,

Yakov Kostikovsky

Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg,

Michael Levi

Cardiff School of Social Sciences,

Dmitri Pentsov

Labour Standards Department, International Labour Office, Geneva,

This article draws on the experience of conducting fieldwork in Russia, as part of an international comparative examination of health and safety regulatory enforcement in the shipping industry. We discuss the difficulties faced by fieldworkers in ensuring personal safety and maintaining rapport with research respondents in conditions characterized by danger and crisis; a situation made worse by the murder of one of our key gatekeepers. We develop a provisional conceptual framework which draws distinctions between the `frontier'-like nature of settings associated with some research areas, the challenges posed by researching institutions faced by various kinds of crisis, and the sensitivity of the specific research topic in question. We argue that a combination of these dimensions produce particular social spaces, which we term `risksaturated', which are especially corrosive of relations with respondents, and which may pose very real physical threats to field workers.

Key Words: crisis-ridden institutions • dangerous fieldwork • respondent rapport • risk, sensitive research topics

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?