Dicuss Data Blog
Blog Post
Specifics of Research Ethics in the Social Sciences: The Case of Central Asia
Heiko Pleines, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen
Research ethics are increasingly standardised in Western academia. But how well do these standards fit the specific contexts of Central Asia? Several recent publications offer valuable insights.
Blog Post
Challenges of Ethnographic Research in Wartime Russia: What to do when Full Consent Is Impossible?
Svetlana Erpyleva, Public Sociology Laboratory
How do you conduct ethical research on sensitive topics in an authoritarian state when informed consent becomes difficult to obtain? Sociologist Svetlana Erpyleva from PS LAB describes how her team had to find its own path between ethical responsibility, growing distrust, and the constraints of semi-covert fieldwork.
Blog Post
Reflections on Data Availability and Collection in Central Asia Under Conditions of Turbulence and Uncertainty
Yerkebulan Sairambay, Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI Essen)
This blog entry focuses on the collection and availability of research data in Kazakhstan, a country in which the author has conducted several research projects. It discusses how digitalisation is making data increasingly available, while authoritarian governance is nevertheless making it challenging to conduct fieldwork and collect research data in the region.
Blog Post
Building Trust with Interlocutors in Qualitative Research on Politically Sensitive Issues in Russia
Svetlana Erpyleva, Public Sociology Laboratory
Studying how ordinary Russians perceive the war against Ukraine means navigating a climate of fear and repression, as simply agreeing to speak with a researcher can feel like a risk. This piece traces how the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) learned, through trial and error, that in authoritarian wartime Russia, trust is not just a methodological nicety - but the crucial foundation on which qualitative fieldwork stands or falls.
Blog Post
Russian Statistical Uncertainty has Risen
Heli Simola, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT)
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, tracking and analyzing trends in the Russian economy has become more challenging. There is greater uncertainty surrounding Russian statistics, making them harder to interpret and requiring extra scrutiny. This situation is influenced both by deliberate decisions made by Russian officials and by structural changes within Russia's economy brought about by the war.
Blog Post
What Do Belarusians Really Think? Unfortunately, We Do Not Know (Much)
The political crisis following the fraudulent 2020 presidential election and subsequent mass protests in Belarus renewed international attention to the country and, in particular, to Belarusian public opinion. Demand for systematic data on societal attitudes increased further after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in which Lukashenka’s regime played an instrumental role. Despite this renewed interest, post-2020 public opinion data on Belarus remain insufficient for drawing valid conclusions about Belarusian society. While potentially informative about broad patterns, these data suffer from methodological problems, which are common to opinion polling in authoritarian contexts.
Blog Post
DiscussDataLab Workshop Report: Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use, and Analysis
Friedrich Leis, University of Bremen
From 25 to 27 August 2025, the first DiscussDataLab, organized by the Discuss Data project, brought together a dozen early career researchers working on Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia with renowned experts in data collection, processing and visualisation. Discuss Data is a collaboration between the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen and the State and University Library, Göttingen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), (https://discuss-data.net). The event took place at the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO) at the University of Bremen (Germany). The three-day workshop, titled “Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use, and Analysis: Public Opinion, Political Debates, and Protests in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War”, aimed to create a room for learning and exchange for scholars with a thematic focus on migration, social media, and protest data.
Blog Post
Coverage or Candour? Survey-Mode Trade-offs for Studying Wartime Ukraine
Aaron Erlich (McGill University)
Russia’s full-scale invasion has created enormous demand for survey data on what Ukrainians think and do. Yet, the choice of survey mode quietly shapes the answers. Drawing on two surveys fielded simultaneously in the summer of 2022, I show that telephone and web surveys each carry a distinct bias. Choosing between them means deciding which kind of error a study can better tolerate.
Blog Post
Reflections on Data Collection in Ukraine Amidst Russia’s War
Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford)
Even under ideal conditions, collecting empirical data is often challenging. Designing a rigorous empirical research project involves the navigation of numerous methodological and ethical considerations alongside practical constraints such as time, funding, and access to participants and field sites. These challenges intensify in conflict settings, where dangerous, volatile environments shape how and what data can be collected, inform the ways they are interpreted, and ultimately, complicate efforts to maintain research integrity. Scholars must consequently often adapt their methods in real time while upholding ethical standards, protecting participants and themselves, and ensuring data validity and reliability.
In this short piece, I illustrate how these challenges have emerged in practice during my experiences conducting nearly 200 online interviews and running six public opinion and conjoint survey experiments in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Although the obstacles I encountered are shaped by my specific discipline (political science), topics, methods, timings, and field context, they reflect broader difficulties in studying conflict-affected societies, and offer guidance for producing ethical, transparent, and decolonial knowledge in such settings – both in Ukraine and elsewhere.