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Research Ethics and Methods

Research Ethics and Methods

PLRI aims to both incorporate and improve upon traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies moving toward innovative, interdisciplinary and participatory frameworks that reflect sex workers priorities and perspectives.

The PLRI strives to develop and embed ways of involving sex workers in the production of knowledge that are ethical and which have greater socio-cultural relevance to sex workers. We plan to make spaces and opportunities for tansformative capacity building, collective thinking, research, strategic knowledge translation and thoughtful advocacy by:

  • Developing innovative and ethical ways of researching sex work
  • Conducting research that is ethical, methodologically sound and theory-driven
  • Publishing and innovatively communicating research findings and analysis of sex work issues
  • Supporting training to increase capacity for high priority, community-based research and its uptake
  • Hosting seminars, conferences and web-based discussion spaces for productive dialogue between scholars, sex workers, policy analysts/makers and advocates

 

Resources

  • Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 - 2012
  • MARKET MORALITIES IN THE FIELD OF COMMERCIAL SEX - 2012

    The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’.

  • MARKET MORALITIES IN THE FIELD OF COMMERCIAL SEX - 2012

    The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’.

  • PLRI WEBSITE NEWS - 2012

    The PLRI website was established in 2010 and it was funded by UNFPA in 2011. However funding was withdrawn in 2012 so updates are now  intermittent. PLRI continues to make research and other important information about health, rights and sex work available on PLRI Twitter and through our regular newsletter.  We look forward to securing new funding for the important work of keeping this website up to date in 2013. 

    Nothing without us !

  • Study protocol for the recruitment of female sex workers and their non-commercial partners into couple-based HIV research - 2012

    Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of addressing HIV risk within the context of intimate relationships rather than solely focusing on individual behaviors. A growing body of evidence suggests that couple-based interventions may be more efficacious than individual-based interventions in promoting safer sex behaviors and reducing drug use.

  • The feasibility of using mobile phone technology for sexual behaviour research in a population vulnerable to HIV: a prospective survey with female sex workers in South India - 2012

    An article in AIDS Care.

    Sexual behaviour studies are often challenged by sampling, participation and measurement biases, and may be unacceptable to participants. We invited 293 randomly selected female sex workers (FSWs) in Bangalore, India, to participate in a telephone survey, with condom breakage as the main outcome. Free cell phones were supplied and trained interviewers telephoned FSWs daily to ask about all sex acts the previous day.

  • Treatment as Prevention: How might the game change for sex workers? - 2011

    “What drives continued expansion of the pandemic is not the absence of effective preventative technologies but discrimination, exploitation and repression of certain social groups,” Dr Peter Piot.

    This article looks at the potential impact of partially effective, non contraceptive HIV prevention methods on sex workers in the light of recent news that anti-retroviral treatment (ART) by people with HIV substantially protects their HIV-uninfected sexual partners from acquiring HIV infection, with a 96 percent reduction in risk of HIV transmission.

  • Action research with sex workers: Dismantling barriers and building bridges - 2011

    Conventional sex work research has tended to pathologize women in the sex industry by studying them as victims who lack the ability to make informed decisions about their lives and their work. Radical feminist research in particular has been successful in affecting public discourses, policy debates, and research agendas in this regard. While sex workers themselves contradict and critique conventional social science and radical feminist research, rarely are their voices heard and rarely have they been included in research processes.

  • Cellphones useful in research targeting Peru’s sex workers - 2011

    Sex workers, a stigmatized population, are also at risk for a host of sexually transmitted infections. As the marginalized women are typically reluctant to visit health clinics, mobile data collection devices are particularly useful to researchers and health workers dealing with this population.In Peru, outreach teams preventively treat the sex workers for infections with the medication metronidazole, in addition to screening them for chlamydia and other conditions. Metronidazole, however, causes headaches, nausea and abdominal pain in some patients.

  • Draft of new Global Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers - 2011

     The following is a draft declaration on sex workers rights and introductory article. Thank you very much to those who made inputs. 

    The process  used to develop this was to copy the ICRSE declaration format and cut and paste material from all documents together into the sections then edit them down to about 20% of the length. This means that the document attached comprises sentences and bits of sentences from various documents by sex workers and allies. 

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