Reflections About Doing on-Line Qualitative Research During the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Absence of Public Policies Regarding the Relation Between Digital Vulnerability and Health Inequality

The social restriction imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic challenged traditional qualitative research methods (e.g., face-to-face interviews or in situ participant and non-participant observations), requiring researchers to adapt classic qualitative practices to this new scenario. In this article, we proposed a reflection on how online communications can produce rich, meaningful, intricate, and detailed qualitative data. For that, we initially explained the pre-pandemic context of our research and the changes that were necessary after the pandemic onset. Afterward, we explored how we decided to do online research and how we prepared ourselves to do so, explaining how our data was produced and sharing the experiences that resulted from this. We also explored how the social inequalities in underdeveloped countries, such as Brazil, and the lack of public policies regarding the relation between public health policies and digital vulnerability still put people in what we call digital insufficiency, which might implicate in the social researcher finding different ways to engage with the population studied. Finally, we reflected on how misconceptions about the capacities of the fieldwork (e.g., that it must be in-person) could diminish the potentialities of qualitative research. We suggested that qualitative methods should move from a conventional single-site location to multiple sites of observation and participation. This approach aligns better with a more situated and contextualized qualitative researcher interested in contemporary sociocultural changes.