Researching With Young Nigerian Girls Trafficked Into Commercial Sex Exploitation in Northern Ghana: Reflections on Methodological and Ethical Challenges and Mitigation Strategies

There have been calls for researchers, especially within the qualitative paradigm, to document and discuss the challenges they experience on the field while researching sensitive topics or with vulnerable groups, as failure to do so creates a missed opportunity for researchers to learn from one another. Accordingly, in this article, we reflect on the several layers of fieldwork challenges we experienced while researching with a vulnerable group (young Nigerian girls trafficked into northern Ghana) on a sensitive topic (commercial sexual exploitation). The reflections on the methodological and ethical challenges in this paper are drawn from a wider qualitative study conducted by the authors to explore the factors predicting the trafficking of young Nigerian girls into commercial sexual exploitation in Ghana’s Tamale Metropolitan area. The sensitive nature of the topic, coupled with the “invisible” manner in which the victims operate in Tamale, naturally raises many ethical and methodological challenges for researchers. The article discusses four main challenges the authors encountered in the field: (i) Accessing Hard-to-Reach Participants, (ii) Ethical Dilemmas in Consent: Demands for Payment, (iii) Trust-Building Strategies, and (iv) Researching in Risky Environments. The paper also discusses the approaches used to surmount these challenges.