‘Times of crisis’ brings to mind unexpected, unprecedented circumstances that appear suddenly. Yet ‘crisis’ has somehow become commonplace. The word ‘crisis’ has two roots – one denotes ‘a vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point’, which in more recent use implies a sense of ‘difficulty, insecurity, and suspense’ (OED). The other, connected root meaning relates this sense of turning point specifically to disease, a critical point when a patient might get better or worse (OED). This dual sense is useful to think with, as this book was written during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers were severely impacted by its effects, even as other diseases, economic and political crises, conflict, climate catastrophe and connected ecological crises of wildfires, water shortages, flooding, and hurricanes continued to occur. The pandemic presented an opportunity to call for engagement in a process of collective reflection and to think about how research might get better (or worse), and how we might think of methodological problems and solutions, discomfort and comfort, dis-ease or ease in the conduct of research. We edited and published three e-books rapidly, in the midst of the continuing and unfolding global public health crisis (Kara and Khoo, 2020 a,b,c). These rapid publications, and this volume, now sit alongside other collectively created responses, such as the crowd-sourced advice on doing fieldwork in pandemic conditions collected by Deborah Lupton (Lupton, 2020) and the rapid review conducted by the UK National Centre for Research Methods (Nind, Meckin, and Coverdale, 2021).

This volume takes time to reflect on qualitative and digital methods, taking ‘crisis’ as a turning point for reflexivity and positionality in research methods and ethics. Its 15 chapters draw on the experiences and reflections of 33 researchers doing diverse research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the UK, Ireland, Nepal, New Zealand, Australia, Puerto Rico, Gaza, Nigeria, and Guatemala. The editors’ geographically diffuse interests and networks probably influenced the character and spread of the contributions in this book. Many concern different locations as ethical environments, making different types of connections and ethical and creative dialogues across researcher-researched relationships and their settings.

In this conclusion, we summarise some lessons from the examples and experiences in the preceding chapters, and in the e-books we edited on ‘Researching in the Age of COVID-19’ (Kara and Khoo, 2020a,b,c). We remember that crisis has two meanings: a sudden occurrence, such as a ship running aground, or a turning point, marking either recovery or deterioration during an illness. We also note that crisis can be fast or slow, one-off or recurrent, and that all these aspects of crisis can interact in complex ways. We offer some recommendations for doing research in times of crisis, and suggest some future directions for the development of methods and ethics in this arena.

The first lesson is that ethics come into sharper focus in times of crisis. We see evidence of Whyte's (2020) ‘epistemology of co-ordination’ in action throughout the whole book, particularly in the form of an emphasis on prioritising relationships, including taking more care of individuals, communities, and ourselves. We see increased connectedness with and care for participants in Hien Thi Nguyen and her colleagues’ work with older Vietnamese migrants, and increased care for communities in Aisling Walsh's work on the aftermath of colonialism and conflict and their intersection with patriarchy. There is concern for researchers’ well-being in Gbenga Shadare's sobering reminder that in some crisis situations researchers’ lives may be at risk, and so methods such as covert research, that may otherwise be questionable, become necessary. Bibek Dahal outlines the layers of complication that can arise when a researcher's topic is ethics and they find themselves caught up in a crisis that requires an ethical response. In Gretchen Stolte and Lisa Oliver's work, we see discovery in the making of connections between First Nations women, and opportunities for yarning, reweaving connections to land, community, and knowledge, and to share survivorship and healing. In sum, this book speaks to Van Brown's call to expand the ethical frame of concern in research through ‘methics’ (Browne and Peek, 2014).

The second lesson is that crises promote creativity, reflexivity, and relationality in research.

Researchers, like everyone else on planet Earth, had no choice but to respond to the pandemic. Yet, again like everyone else, researchers had a lot of choice about how to respond. All three of the volumes in this series exemplify researchers at their best: reassessing their methods and approaches, with care for others and themselves, creatively and ethically. The separation of the volumes into different topics is to some extent an artificial device to support discussion and thought around these complex issues. Although the chapters you just read have been placed in this volume because they say more about response and reassessment than about ethics, creativity, resilience or care, the latter elements also run through these accounts.

We received more submissions about going digital – that is, moving in-person and in-place research online – than about any other sub-topic in this series. A sizeable number of these submissions were about switching from face-to-face interviewing to doing interviews online. This has already been covered in some detail in the methods literature: Hanna (2012) and Salmons (2015) are seminal contributors; there are many others. We didn't want to repeat that here, and we were fortunate also to have submissions exploring other aspects of going digital. Helena Vicente and her colleagues in the European Union needed to move planned face-to-face research encounters online, but at a rather different scale from interviews: they worked with large groups of students and experts forming science camps in six European countries, and devised a novel method of taking this work online. There is an English saying that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, and we can also see that in action in Emmanuel Ndhlovu's use of text messaging and voice notes for data gathering in rural Zimbabwe, and in Louise Couceiro's use of electronic ‘reader response toolkits’ in her UK research into children's reading. All these innovative approaches may well have utility beyond their initial contexts, not least because all the researchers found that, once the early challenges had been overcome, the methods they had chosen offered more advantages than disadvantages.

Mridulya Narasimhan, Jagannath R and Fabrizio Valenti researched different ways of doing survey research using computer-aided telephone interviews in India and Bangladesh. This method is notorious for low response rates, and their findings offer suggestions for increasing response rates while maximizing researcher productivity.