Research With Participants in Problem Experience: Challenges and Strategies

In this article, the author draws on his years of fieldwork contact with participants who experience various problem events in life, including truancy, running away, delinquency, vagrancy, homelessness, gang membership, criminal conviction, drug abuse, domestic abuse, sexual deviance, sexually transmitted disease, mental disorder, and infection with HIV/AIDS. He examines challenges from and explores strategies for research with participants in problem experience, on the matter of recruitment, participation, empowerment, cross-checking, and researcher protection. He includes examples to illustrate how generalizations in each category are made from real-world observation.