by Prof. Dr. Vivienne de Vogel, University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands

Research involving sensitive and stigmatized populations is essential for developing evidence-based practice. Yet these groups are often underrepresented in research because of ethical, legal, and practical challenges. This workshop explores how researchers can conduct ethically responsible and scientifically rigorous research with vulnerable populations, drawing on Viviennes experiences working as a scientist-practitioner in forensic mental health care. 

First, Vivienne will share experiences from her research in forensic mental health care, focusing on the minority group of women admitted to forensic psychiatric services as well as other vulnerable forensic groups, such as severely traumatized patients or patients with intellectual disabilities. Together, you will discuss challenges and ethical dilemmas, including obtaining informed consent, potential selection bias, researcher-clinician dual roles, and the meaningful inclusion of participants who may be difficult to engage in research.

Next, you will practice with a real-world case involving a PhD project on trauma treatment in forensic inpatients that encountered challenges in obtaining ethical approval. Together, you will explore how to balance participant autonomy with scientific validity, identify barriers to conducting research in forensic settings, and develop strategies to improve inclusion and representation in future studies.

Combining lessons learned from both research and forensic clinical practice, this workshop encourages critical reflection on how we can generate stronger evidence for populations whose voices are often absent from research. Participants will leave with practical recommendations that can be applied in their own research and professional contexts.

by Prof. Dr. Gabriel Scheidecker, University of Zurich

In recent years, an increasing number of publications have questioned psychology and related sciences by pointing to severe Western, middle-class sampling biases. While this sampling bias has been widely discussed in terms of the universal validity of findings and theories in basic science, we will discuss how it might affect applied science and interventions, particularly how it might lead to unjustified deficit views of populations outside the middle class. As a concrete example, we will look at Early Childhood Development interventions in the Global South (Global ECD), a large field of international development and global health that aims to optimize child development, including through parenting interventions. We will focus on how optimal care is defined and measured and what might be problematic about these definitions and measurements given the Western sampling bias and available ethnographic research on the global diversity of childrearing practices and arrangements.

At the beginning of the workshop, Gabriel will give a brief introduction to Global ECD and some of its basic assumptions, as well as to his own PhD research on early childhood in Madagascar as an example of ethnographic evidence that challenges some of these assumptions, focusing particularly on socially distributed childcare. This input will prepare the ground for the subsequent discussion.

In the discussion, we will first jointly analyse how claims about widespread deficits in parenting and caregiving in low- and middle-income countries are produced. As an example, we will examine the measurement of inadequate care underlying one of the recent foundational articles for Global ECD: Draper et al. (2024), “The next 1000 days: building on early investments for the health and development of young children,” The Lancet, 404(10467), 2094–2116. In a final round, participants will have the opportunity to discuss potential assessment biases in their own areas of expertise and develop ideas for how these might be identified and reduced.