Equal parts researcher and advocate: having an impact in hard-to-reach communities

Conducting fieldwork in hard-to-reach communities can pose significant challenges. Sarah G. Zawacki‘s research focuses on health in Roma migrant communities and to overcome participants’ initial wariness and mistrust she constructed a data collection strategy in which she was as much a community advocate as a researcher. It is through such active involvement with hard-to-reach communities, and by placing their impressions and experiences in a wider sociocultural context, that research studies can derive most value and afford a depth of understanding of their participants not possible through interviews alone.