Walking into their lives: Applying the go-along method to explore refugee health.

Abstract

The go-along method is a way of interviewing people in situ. Combining participant observation and interviewing, the method capitalizes on the advantages of both approaches. This places study participants in context and allows researchers to elicit the interpretations, practices, and experiences of those participants within the contexts. Based on a refugee maternal health study that involved the go-along method in the United States, we reflect on the specific research questions that this approach can help answer, the advantages and limitations of employing this methodological approach and delineate the process of conducting the go-along. The go-along method has numerous benefits in studying refugee health. It can assist in identifying the needs and challenges of people with limited language skills or low educational levels, as well as providing a more nuanced understanding of life skills and language proficiency. It can aid in the observation of interactions between study participants and people around them and provide more detailed information based on spatial cues. It can assist researchers in observing how services are delivered on the ground. More importantly, it can facilitate researchers' vicarious experiences for those who may struggle in their lives. In doing so, it can facilitate contextualized understanding of refugee and their experiences. Although this method has several limitations, such as being more time-consuming and labor-intensive compared to traditional sit-down interviews and being susceptible to external conditions, the go-along method has significant potential for exploring the health of refugees.