Social work practitioners in post-conflict Northern Ireland: Lessons from a critical ethnography

Abstract

This article presents candid lessons learned by an ‘outsider’ conducting qualitative research in Northern Ireland over a 15-month period. Former combatant women (N = 14) with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were interviewed using a critical ethnography framework. The findings include a description of difficulties in conducting such research in the areas of accessing hard-to-reach samples, building trust and credibility over time, having a main gatekeeper, maintaining an apolitical position, modeling non-judgmental attitudes, and at all costs safeguarding confidentiality. These lessons resonated with the core tenets of social work practice which enabled and facilitated the conduct of this study.

Keywords

Conflict ethnography female combatants fieldwork qualitative methods social work practice war

Intrastate conflict, primarily civil and ethnic, remains the leading form of war (Doyle and Sambanis, 2006; Paris, 2006). As social work practice expands globally, both practitioners and researchers are embedded in former and current war zones. Due to the uncertainty inherent in war, research manifests differently in conflict societies. This article examines methodological challenges for conducting social work research in war zones. It critically reviews the current context of war in current and former spaces of conflict and the implications for methodological decision-making and design. Rich descriptions of research fieldwork conducted by the author in post-conflict Northern Ireland with former female combatants in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) provide the backdrop to this article.

The qualitative approach used in this research study was critical ethnography, which focuses on underrepresented and marginalized cultural groups. While general ethnography describes the ‘… patterns of values, behaviors, beliefs, and language of a culture-sharing group’, critical ethnography extends the research approach to include a social justice perspective and the expectation that there are larger political and societal concerns for the population of study (Creswell, 2007). Critical ethnography deliberately pushes the researcher to identify the situational status quo of the environment, challenge hegemonic assumptions, and illuminate issues of power and control in identities, groups, and communities (Madison, 2012). This method was used by the author, an outsider in Northern Ireland, and describes the lessons learned in this research journey.

This article adds to the research literature on social work practice with war-affected women, emphasizing such methodological challenges as the identification of gatekeepers and access to participants in conflict-affected or post-conflict societies. In addition to focusing on utility of methods, this article also focuses on a unique group of participants. Extant literature available on female ex-combatants states that access to these women is difficult (Alison, 2009; McEvoy, 2009); therefore, my experiences in conducting a critical ethnography with female combatants in the Provisional IRA are described in order to add to the literature on female combatants.

Prior to this discussion, a brief history of social work practice in conflict-affected countries and then Northern Ireland will be presented. This discussion establishes that social work practitioners have had an important role to play in these countries, even as the role of social work researcher is a relatively new venture in such settings.

Social work practice in conflict zones

Globally, and in the last 60 years, the landscape of war has changed from the pre-Cold War era of international conflict, from interstate to intrastate conflicts. Currently, intrastate conflict is the leading form of war, typically bounded by ethnicity, religion, or cultural identity (Doyle and Sambanis, 2006; Paris, 2006). ‘Civil conflicts’ or ‘civil wars’ are essentially ‘intrastate conflicts’ within countries or territories, such as the Liberian Civil War or the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ethnic conflicts are civil wars, but with ethnic identity at the forefront of the struggle for power, such as the Bosnian War or the Rwandan genocide (Mays et al., 1998). Such conflicts are often fought in neighborhoods and communities; modern warfare statistics reveal that almost 90 percent of casualties are civilians, primarily women and children (Nordstrom, 2005). Additionally, both social work practitioners and sometimes researchers work with refugees affected by mental health issues as a result of these conflicts (Li and Francis, 2014). Generally, these conflicts tend to be of high intensity and resistant to external peacemaking attempts. Such conflicts also have periods of violence that follow seasons or defined periods (Goodhand, 2008). In the case of Northern Ireland, for example, flashes of political violence often occur on key historic anniversary dates, such as Bloody Sunday, or during the Catholic and Protestant marching season.

Social work practitioners in conflict zones are faced with numerous challenges, such as fear of loss of life, violence, unstable infrastructures, and working conditions. They are also regularly faced with complex moral and ethical dilemmas, and what it means to practice in such cultural contexts (Ramon et al., 2006). Work in conflict zones with ethnic or religious divisions, such as Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant divide or the Israeli and Palestinian divide, may infer that one works with an agency that serves both groups or collaborates with opposing group organizations (Ramon et al., 2006).

Additionally, social work practitioners in conflict zones often learn to move beyond a stance of neutrality and apolitical perspectives in practice in order to confront overt discrimination. Indeed, ethno-religious divisions in conflict permeate most state and social structures, creating a sense of new bureaucratic responses (Campbell and Healey, 1999). State bureaucratic structures in these regions often complicate social work practice, especially in areas where social and economic access is given to one group, while denying access to another group. Social workers confront such divisions on multiple levels, including (a) institutional levels, where an arm of the state enforces discriminatory practices through the legal system, security forces, and the provision of social welfare services, (b) cultural and ideological levels, where discrimination is enhanced through negative stereotypes, beliefs, or myths about the other group, and (c) at individual levels, where identity is formed through group membership, self-censoring, self-awareness, and the denial of prejudice and discrimination (Laird, 2004).

The ability for social work practitioners to conform to their traditional professional roles is difficult at times when unity to a social or ethnic group is required during violent outbreaks. While ethically necessary, the ability to separate the professional, the personal, and the political in areas of violence is formidable, if possible at all. Ramon et al. (2006) found that social workers in Northern Ireland and also in Israel and Palestine faced major issues in practice, namely, intimidation from security forces or other armed groups, psychological trauma, housing problems after mass destruction, physical violence, living in constant fear and anxiety, and fewer economic possibilities. Another study examined the shared reality of the Gaza War among social work practitioners and found that they experienced multiple levels of stress as an individual, a family member, and practitioner (Baum, 2011). Ramon et al. (2006) contended that as a result of these issues, social workers attempt to normalize their behaviors by providing a value-free, neutral, and professional service in the face of violence. Social work practitioners in these conflict settings have emphasized the need for resiliency in the face of complex challenges, but the ethical, emotional, and societal pressures about how to coexist with colleagues of the other group or with service users of the other group remain challenging (Campbell and Healey, 1999).

Social work in post-conflict Northern Ireland

Campbell (1999) stated that during the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland, over 3500 people were killed, and more were injured and traumatized, all occurring in a population of 1.6 million. Out of the estimated 3523 people have died as a result of the Troubles during 1969–1994, 53 percent were civilians, 15 percent were in the British Army, 13 percent were Provisional IRA members, and 8 percent were the Royal Ulster Constabulary(RUC) (Mitchell, 2008). The death rate for Catholics was higher than for Protestants. Since the conflict ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, there has been an increase in suicide, psychiatric and post-traumatic stress, and mental health concerns directly related to the Troubles.

Ghigliazza (2008) claimed that the role social workers played in armed conflict, specifically in Northern Ireland, is under-researched. Sectarian violence and social division presented dangers to social workers trying to bridge the divide, and even finding acceptable language was fraught with challenges. Merely calling Northern Ireland, ‘Ulster’, the ‘North of Ireland’, or ‘Northern Ireland’ implies (by default) a political allegiance. Similar studies on divided societies found social workers wrestling with silencing on conflict discussions in social work education in Israel and emphasize the need for context-specific reflexivity in conflict zones (Nadan and Ben-Ari, 2014; Segev and Nadan, 2014). The reasons for this have been examined by scholars, most notably Jim Campbell, who articulated the ways social work became bureaucratic and technocratic and seized onto an identity of professionalism in the Northern Ireland conflict, essentially ignoring sectarianism by hiding behind of the pretext of neutrality and disassociation from the war (Campbell and Healey, 1999; Heenan, 2004; Houston, 2008).

Over the course of the Troubles, social work practice turned from community-based practice to a strong bureaucratic system that served to provide practitioners with the ability to serve at a distance from sectarianism and societal division (Skehill, 2003). Professionalism, adherence to a medical model of clinical detachment, and the notion of ‘rising above’ sectarianism classified practice during the conflict. Smyth and Campbell (1996) argued that sectarianism actually provided a rationalization for the removal of local service provision to non-sectarian government bodies. Despite being created to eradicate biases and prejudice from practice, it resulted in a social service sector that was removed from their clients and from discrimination in Northern Ireland, creating a practice culture that discouraged an open discussion of sectarianism and its influence on social work practice. Social workers, for example, often had to collaborate with paramilitary forces in certain neighborhoods in order to gain access to communities and individuals. Additionally, certain policies such as child-care provision in child welfare saw services split down sectarian lines, similar to the educational system, which is still organized by religion with only 5 percent of the schools in Northern Ireland desegregated to this day (Houston, 2008).

Campbell and Healey (1999) interviewed social workers about their practice during the Troubles and their ability to acknowledge sectarianism. Practice scenarios often meant that social workers had to have British Army and RUC police accompaniment when carrying out certain duties in mental health or child welfare fields, often because the police force needed protection from the communities themselves. Clients fled the paramilitaries, British Army, or RUC police threats into psychiatric hospitals, using them as safe houses. Campbell and Healey (1999) stated that social workers were guided by the axiom, ‘whatever you say, you say nothing’, in relation to paramilitaries and sectarian violence.

Social work and ex-combatant women in Northern Ireland

Social workers in Northern Ireland are still reconsidering their roles in social service provision and addressing the post-conflict legacies of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion (Heenan, 2004). Such legacies, in particular, affect many women in war-affected societies. However, in Northern Ireland, a number of women joined the Official and Provisional IRA and loyalist paramilitaries during the course of the Troubles and were active fighters, engaging in violent activities. Many women were arrested and became political prisoners, experiencing gendered violence utilized by the British state through forced strip searches, rape, and sexual assault of Provisional IRA members (O’Keefe, 2006). Despite the achievement of constitutional political equality in Northern Ireland, the political settlement in 1998 was not the end of the struggle for these women (Young, 2001). Research revealed that the voice of female combatants has been removed from much of the peace process, except for exceptional cases (McEvoy, 2009). Even as late as 2011, scholars were discussing how these women have been left out of the conflict discourse in Northern Ireland, with little understanding of how the conflict affected them (Gray and Neill, 2011).

The study of female identity and female participation in conflict may assist social workers and others in the helping professions in developing interventions on the micro level, while also influencing advocacy and policy-making on the macro level (Kushner et al., 2006). On a community and societal level, armed conflict and political violence lead to psychosocial trauma where social relations and societal structures that form the basis of society are fragmented, and social well-being becomes disrupted (Kushner et al., 2006). Without addressing the needs of females involved in armed conflict, social ties and patterns of interaction may be destroyed.

Conducting a critical ethnography in Northern Ireland: Selected research challenges from an outsider

The previous sub-sections provided an overview of the literature on selected issues affecting social work practitioners in conflict and post-conflict zones, using Northern Ireland and war-affected women as examples. This sub-section provides a discussion of some methodological challenges in conducting research on this subject in Northern Ireland.

There has been a significant amount of research conducted in war zones (Barakat et al., 2002; Burgess et al., 2007; Ford et al., 2009; Goodhand, 2008; Jennings, 2007; Kovats-Bernat, 2002; Mock, 2002; Thaler, 2012; Utas, 2005a, 2005b). However, this article focuses on selected challenges confronted by an outsider (of the country) in conducting this critical ethnography. I conducted a qualitative critical ethnography in Northern Ireland examining female combatants’ agency, voice, identity, and representation during the violent political conflict and in the resulting cultural and political transformation, to develop an exploratory and deep description of female combatants’ lived experiences pre- and post-conflict. The research context was that of the former Provisional IRA female combatant in Belfast and (London) Derry, Northern Ireland. Data collection took place from 13 May to 1 August 2013 in Belfast and (London) Derry, Northern Ireland. These were the main lessons learned in this exciting yet challenging country to conduct such research within.

Gaining access

Gaining access to conduct this research in general and access to the sample of former combatant women and local gatekeepers will be presented herein. In this study, and consistent with the literature (Barakat et al., 2002; Lahai, 2010; Mazurana et al., 2002; Mitchell, 2008; Siriam et al., 2009; Utas, 2005b), a foremost initial challenge in conducting this fieldwork involved gaining access to the sample as an outsider. In my own experience, Northern Ireland has been open to researchers for over two decades; I experienced no interest from official government channels or the devolved powers. Access was most challenging at the community level, as players from opposing sides of the conflict had vested interests in the post-conflict transformation of Belfast including, but not limited to, political power. And, as is to be expected in regions experiencing strife, my legitimacy was assessed by members of the Belfast and (London) Derry community repeatedly, not just by gatekeepers and participants but also by the average citizens learning I was an outsider conducting research into this conflict.

As with all fieldwork, establishing trust and legitimacy is paramount to the research process in general (Siriam et al., 2009) and to the access issue in particular. To establish research legitimacy in Northern Ireland, one must be aware there is deep-rooted hostility between the two major ethno-religious groups. Suspicions about the ulterior motives of potential research could block access or curtail data gathering. Undertaking any research means making sure the political or former paramilitary groups are informed foremost about any proposed research. To date, ongoing violence and criminality among paramilitaries in Northern Ireland continues, although levels of politically motivated killings and bombings have reduced. Lower levels of community violence have continued, and despite a decline in shootings, punishment beatings by paramilitary organizations and loyalist vigilantism have increased from levels preceding the ceasefires (Mitchell, 2008).

During my time in Northern Ireland, I consistently answered questions from local actors and general citizens about the study, who I was and was not interviewing, and what side of the conflict I was researching. Despite being in Northern Ireland specifically to work with former combatant women in the Provisional IRA, I was often ‘pushed’ by local stakeholders to interview members of opposing side of the conflict. If I had accepted those offers to interview women on the loyalist side of the conflict, I risked (a) eroding the trust that was built with the republican community and (b) recalcitrant or non-forthcoming interviews. In these instances, I declined offers to interview opposing groups from the conflict. Establishing trust meant building assurance that my motives were to give voice to ex-combatant women who felt they already lacked a voice in post-conflict conversations outside of the republican community. I took every precaution to gain trust, safeguard confidentiality, and provide transparency to the overall process. Reaching out to, or conducting interviews with, loyalist women risked eroding the trust given to me by republican women, who were confiding their personal, and oftentimes, traumatic histories to me.

Access to former combatant women

Immersion in the field enabled access to a group of former Provisional IRA members whose access is historically elusive and hard to gain. Often, female members of fighting forces are difficult to isolate in post-conflict societies for several reasons: they are silenced because they want to be allowed back into their home communities, of loss of access to humanitarian aid, and potential persecution or shunning from societies that value traditional gender roles (Utas, 2005b). Since this research was conducted ‘boots on the ground’ in a post-conflict setting, it was prone to suspicions around the nature and purpose of the critical ethnography throughout its entirety.

In Northern Ireland, I was not only a privileged outsider who was granted access to a closed group of women, requiring ongoing consideration of my position within the community and my activities accordingly, but I was also there as a critical ethnographer (Madison, 2012). Therefore, I was constantly weighting the privileging of knowledge and my position or lack thereof within that knowledge. Using this method meant acknowledging from the outset that the research is a partial and biased representation of a culture-sharing group by the researcher, who, like myself, was typically an outsider to the cultural group (Madison, 2012). Thus, a researcher must reflexively address how analyses are dominatory acts, and the researcher’s position of perceived power, privilege, and bias must be transparent in data collection and interpretation.

I entered the field with biases and interpretations from four main perspectives. First, I approached knowledge on, and of, the conflict with a lens of postcolonialism. I worked under the assumption that the North of Ireland was, and is still, considered occupied by the British government. There are longstanding debates on whether Ireland, and thus the North, can truly be called a ‘colony’ (Atlantic Education Trust, 1972; Eagleton et al., 1990). However, using postcolonial theory, I made the choice to view it as an occupied State and to privilege the perspective of Irish Catholic republicans, as they were the voices of this study. Second, I approached violence and conflict with a perspective informed by working as a former crime scene investigator in a metropolitan area of the Southern United States. I was familiar with working in a male-dominated field and the sights and sounds of violence – as they occurred – and their aftermath. Third, I am a white, middle-class woman from the United States; I am not a member of the group in this critical ethnography, nor will I be. I acted as an outsider with compassion, and empathy in all of my deliberations during this study. Fourth, I have worked in post-conflict areas, specifically in Northern Ireland and Liberia. Previously in Liberia, I became aware of many issues facing the reintegration of former combatant women. This meant that I was familiar with issues of conflict, post-conflict transformation, violence, and peace, and it was just enough to know that I didn’t know enough.

Initially, several facts about my outsider identity posed barriers to developing trust with the female ex-combatants in the republican community. As an American, my perspective on the republican community was initially assumed to be based on the prevalent media coverage throughout the Troubles. As an academic, it was assumed I was entering the field with biased interpretations of republican women’s voice and roles in the Troubles. This was not specific to me however, but it created an umbrella of suspicion about my political motives and underlying perspectives on the Provisional IRA and republicans in Northern Ireland.

I made conscious efforts to counter these effects over the course of the year, as described in the process of identifying a local and respected gatekeeper and communicating via e-mail and telephone. My main gatekeeper’s history with the Provisional IRA was well known and publicized, so her legitimization of the research process led to access to the participants. Additionally, I was invited to live with a republican family while I was in Belfast for 3 months, which helped with cultural immersion into the larger republican community and the eventual study participants. With each participant, I took care to explain the research and the expectations surrounding the research; I maintained honesty about my role and transparency in my efforts to conduct the research. It became clear to me that any use of deception or lack of transparency would have stopped the research process entirely.

Identifying other local gatekeepers

I was aware from both my previous experiences in conflict zones and the academic literature to approach various leaders in the community to establish local gatekeepers (Creswell, 2007; Goodhand, 2008; Utas, 2005a; Utas, 2005b). In many conflict zones, however, formal powers, such as elected political figures, are not always the best method of access in the communities (Siriam et al., 2009). While this is partly because political or community figures may be seen as legitimizing or favoring a particular group, in Northern Ireland, certain political parties have long been seen as having a direct pipeline into the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries. Approaching research through Sinn Féin, the political party affiliated with republicanism and associated with the IRA, however, meant that researchers would be interviewing individuals associated with Sinn Féin, potentially exposing the research to sampling bias. A participant, not associated with Sinn Féin, told me that it is easier to disagree with Sinn Féin, if you are not in Sinn Féin. Nevertheless, Sinn Féin holds ultimate power in the republican community and safeguards the community from many encroaching researchers. Thus, Sinn Féin and the republican community face a deluge of interview requests on a regular basis, receiving anywhere from 20 to 25 interview requests per week (Correspondence, 28 June 2013).

Since I studied a closed, unique group of female Provisional IRA members, both those highly visible in the community and those who have kept their membership status unofficial, it was important for the achievement of the critical ethnography to identify all the gatekeepers of this group. In order to build trust and gain access to this population, I first conducted a needs assessment in Northern Ireland 12-months prior to fieldwork, establishing credibility and identifying gatekeepers, giving myself time to build more trust, rapport, and legitimacy. I spent 3 weeks ‘on the ground’ in Northern Ireland conducting this needs assessment. During that time, I met with post-conflict peace workers active in the republican communities and discussed the study. This included their perspectives on what is missing from the research literature on Northern Ireland and issues straining trust for researchers. It was noted multiple times by local persons that researchers come and go without disseminating their research back to the community.

Using connections with these local peace workers provided an additional net of neutrality with which to approach the overall research process, as they were associated with peace projects and post-conflict transformation in the region. Through these connections, I was introduced to my (previously mentioned) local gatekeeper to the republican community and female former combatants in the Provisional IRA. She was a former IRA member, Sinn Féin activist, ex-prisoner, and current peace and community worker in the republican community. Familiar with various researchers entering the community with little knowledge of the conflict, she cautiously tested my knowledge of the republican community and paid close attention to the terminology used in this conversation. Language, in Northern Ireland and other conflict-affected zones, is fraught with numerous implications. Sectarian violence and social division could present danger to social work researchers trying to bridge the divide, and even finding the acceptable language to effectively converse is challenging and implies a political allegiance. In this case, I was careful to refer to the Provisional IRA as an army, and the combatants were comrades and soldiers, demonstrating some understanding of their position throughout the conflict. Later, I was informed by my gatekeeper that many researchers entered the community referring to the IRA as paramilitary and as terrorists, which demonstrated a lack of understanding of the republican position on the conflict and limits the overall trust in the researcher.

Over the next year, the gatekeeper and I discussed issues of building trust and avenues for research in the republican community. This continued conversation was crucial to regain access to my target group, former combatant women, upon my return to Belfast the following year. Through her eventual acceptance of my status as a researcher in the republican community, interviews became possible in a way that it was clear they would not have been without her input and assistance. There were times participants were unresponsive, but once she made the introductions and supported the study, an interview was scheduled immediately. I was subsequently invited into republican activists’ and ex-combatant women’s homes and offices, and over time, was introduced to women who were not as open about their affiliation with the IRA. This spoke to the need for a trusted community member to provide access to the women formerly affiliated with the Provisional IRA or active republicans during the conflict and also during the research study.

Additional research challenges and lessons learned

Confidentiality

As mentioned previously, conflict settings are notoriously politicized by their very nature. Areas hoping to remain out of the violence or communities wanting to avoid risks of reprisal from armed forces in their midst may choose to adopt a ‘strategy of silence’ (Thaler, 2012). In some violent conflicts, individuals are summarily killed to instigate fear in the rest of the population, as ethnic cleansing and genocide are utilized to wipe out entire groups of people. Confidentiality, therefore, becomes a paramount and sometimes life and death concern. Ethically, situations may occur between maintaining confidentiality and maintaining silence in the face of human rights abuses.

Informed consent in a conflict setting like everything else looks very different in non-conflict settings. Researchers should take care not to compromise any conditions for certain populations through participation in the study and consider whether signed consent is ethically possible in insecure settings. Confidentiality issues, anonymity of personal identity, and the right to refuse to participate are important in conflict settings. Issues with illiteracy and signing a consent form may also cause participants to fear for their own safety (Dolnik, 2011).

In Northern Ireland, one of the methods for ensuring confidentiality was banning recording devices from interviews, as interviews were not recorded for transcription. Due to the Boston College lawsuit (in 2012, Boston College was subpoenaed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to release 86 case files collected during an oral history project on the Troubles, which were only to be released posthumously) and a desire to elicit as much information as possible, it was decided to forgo any recordings. There is a long history of surveillance, informers, and collusion in Northern Ireland; therefore, it seemed wise to ease my participants’ minds as much as possible. No phones, computers, or recording devices were brought into the interviews. I took handwritten notes in a bound notebook. Immediately upon starting the interview, I wrote a number, the date, and the time of the interview starting and the time it ended. Participant business cards were not kept, and names were not written in my data book or my interview notebook. As a result, I cannot honestly disclose the names of anyone that I interviewed. Additionally, all informed consent was given verbally, and not in written form. There were no documents or recordings that traced the women back to the research study in any way.

All interviews were conducted between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. during the workweek. All took place in republican communities, and I did not physically ‘map’ out locations of the interviews, as most of them took place in easily identified community agencies and offices. In keeping the confidentiality of the participants paramount, that meant (for me) ensuring that absolutely nothing could be tracked back to their personal identities. The communities are small, and in the republican community, there is a sense that ‘someone’ is always ‘watching’ the community. For the purpose of this critical ethnography, if I felt that any combination of a ‘mapping out’ of the interview space and the interview excerpts could link back to the participants, I erred on the side of caution. Finally, each of these confidentiality safeguards was fully explained to the combatant women, sometimes repeatedly.

Vulnerability and security

Living in any conflict zone means that individuals experience higher levels of physical threats and emotional and psychological distress. Loss of life and home are not uncommon, and it is important for researchers to consider the ramifications of requesting participants to talk about their lived personal experiences, which may be frightening, humiliating, and traumatizing for many. Researchers must understand that certain subjects might be forbidden or could endanger participants. Researchers also risk re-traumatizing participants; an understanding of the context of the conflict and awareness of the individual’s comfort level are essential (Dolnik, 2011; Ford et al., 2009; Goodhand, 2008). If research is focused on combatants or former combatants, researchers have to consider the messages that are being sent by the research process and/or study. Caution should be exercised so that the study, and/or process, is not sending the message that they are ‘legitimizing warring groups’ by carefully considering who politically gains from the activity (Goodhand, 2008).

Issues of security affect both participants and researchers in varying ways, not just physical security, but also an awareness of potential vulnerabilities for the participants. In Northern Ireland, security meant protecting the confidentiality of ex-combatant women from outside sources with political motivations or from those who stood to gain from identifying participants, as outlined earlier. The women in this study were very wary of discussing certain roles and activities in the conflict, and in many cases chose to speak in ‘code’ or obliquely about their roles and participation in the conflict. All these women experienced violence, harassment, and loss of loved ones as a result of the conflict. To further protect their vulnerabilities and safety, I took care to approach topics via active listening, empathy, and sensitivity to their comfort, utilizing social work practice skills in the course of the study process (Akesson et al., 2014; Gerdes and Segal, 2011; Huerta-Wong and Schoech, 2010).

Due to ongoing political riots and bus bombings at the time of this research preparation, issues of safety had to be weighed against issues of immersion in the field. When deciding on locations for fieldwork, one of the items I considered was the high marching season, which took place during my time in Belfast. I was aware of violence occurring during the marching season and considered that emotions might influence the participants more during this time than at other points in the year. This year, the 12th parades led to 5 days of intense rioting in the Short Strand and Ardoyne interface areas. Ultimately, the decision was made to be present for the marching season. Ten days after I flew out of Dublin to return to the United States, 56 officers were injured in riots that broke out in the City Centre on Royal Avenue (Belfast Telegraph, 2013). A few months later, a bomb exploded next to Belfast City Cemetery on the Falls Road, ostensibly carried out by dissident republicans (Belfast Telegraph, 15 March 2014). These events speak to the tenuous peace, and to the violence that still remains.

Concluding remarks

In summary, the author’s experience in Northern Ireland provides examples of the need for flexibility and caution in the field. Site selection for fieldwork requires consideration of location, access, and safety for the researcher. Additionally, issues of access to the population of study may require longer periods of trust building and communication between gatekeepers and the researchers than originally perceived. Confidentiality and the safety of the research participants may influence the methods of data collection, issues of informed consent, and compromise the ability to keep detailed maps or information on locations and participants. Finally, the researcher must constantly weigh issues of personal safety with issues of data collection in the field.

This was a fortuitous opportunity for a social work researcher. I was able to build on a 2 years’ previous relationship with Northern Ireland and the needs assessment, gaining friends and living with a republican family. No, the research methods are not necessarily unique, but what is unique to social work research is the action of giving voice to marginalized people. The research resonated with core social work values: confidentiality, person-in-environment, and staying non-judgmental, which made this task somewhat easier.

Further discussion of social work research methods in conflict and post-conflict settings may assist in building knowledge of good practice among social workers practicing in complex, violent settings. By expanding research and knowledge in the area of conflict studies, social workers can give voice to the voiceless and connect individual testimony to structural and historical oppression. Hopefully, the insights and lessons learned by an outsider conducting research in Northern Ireland may assist other ‘outsiders’ in addressing these issues in other war-torn nations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Melinda Williams Moore, MSW, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Carl Vinson Institute of Government in the Survey Research and Evaluation Unit at the University of Georgia. She has worked in the field in several armed conflict zones and her areas of research include gender, armed conflict, and postcolonial studies.

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