A Guide for Graduate Students

This paper will explore the challenges graduate students may encounter when working with socially vulnerable groups in the field. It is written from the perspective of a current graduate student and draws on her ethnographic experiences in Nairobi Province, Kenya, to provide some modest advice to other researchers. Particular attention is paid to some of the more common challenges students may encounter in the field working with vulnerable groups such as research design, ethical considerations, and participant recruitment and retention. This article concludes with a framework through which to study these groups.