Should there be international standards for qualitative social work research? A commentary on utility,contradictions,and reframing to principles

Abstract

This commentary critically examines the promise and contradictions inherent in developing international standards for qualitative social work research. It contributes by proposing that ethics guided by epistemic freedom and epistemic justice can act as a foundation for flexible principles enhancing qualitative social work research on an international level.

A few years ago, I was invited to speak at an opening plenary roundtable about the practicality of the development of a global qualitative social work research network, and the utility of developing international standards for qualitative social work research. As a recently relocated scholar now working across international contexts, I have observed significant variation in how qualitative research is conceptualized and conducted. For example, ethical expectations regarding participation and consent can differ markedly across contexts: approaches that emphasize individual written consent and predefined interview protocols in some Western research settings may conflict with relational, collective, or community-mediated ethical practices elsewhere. These differences are not merely procedural, but epistemic, shaping whose knowledge is considered legitimate, how data are produced, and what forms of inquiry are deemed rigorous. This commentary uniquely contributes to social work by proposing ethics guided by of epistemic freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) and epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007) as a foundation for developing international qualitative research standards. By sharing the challenges of misinformation, data misuse, and research literacy and participatory research, and calling out the risks of international standards, it advances international social work qualitative research by suggesting that flexible, co-governed, and culturally specific standards can both strengthen ethical accountability and prevent the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in knowledge production. This approach offers a practical framework for socially just, globally coherent, and contextually grounded research practice in social work.

Social work research

Social work research has the potential to build our knowledge base, solving practical problems in practice and policy (Rubin, 2009). Due to the interdisciplinary nature of our work, our research principles and procedures build upon and extend work in other applied disciplines. While some qualitative approaches are developing that are specific to social work, such as the use of simulation (Asakura et al., 2024), our qualitative approaches include those that involve community in research (Branom, 2012), borrow and build upon the work being done in other areas (e.g. sociology) and allied disciplines (e.g. psychology) (Grinnell et al., 2019). But what makes our research, especially our qualitative research, distinctive is our commitments to upholding core values and principles of the social work profession – particularly the inherent dignity of humans, promoting human rights, and advancing social justice (International Federation of Social Workers, 2018).

Recent literature emphasizes that while qualitative social work methodologies are diversifying globally, the field lacks a shared framework for evaluating ethics and contextual sensitivity (Jönsson and Lian Flem, 2022; Peled and Leichtentritt, 2002; Taquette and Borges da Matta Souza, 2022). Scholars have called for dialogue that bridges the dominance of Western research paradigms with locally grounded epistemologies (Gray et al., 2013; Roman, 2016; Seymour, 2024).

Our qualitative research often engages with the lived experiences of those whom we make it our duty to protect. It may involve community participation, inform policies that shape daily lives, or influence interventions used in practice. Yet little guidance exists to ensure that we uphold our ethical principles consistently on a global scale when conducting qualitative social work research. A qualitative study that meets institutional ethics standards in one country could be considered ethically insufficient or culturally inappropriate in another. For example, findings generated through context-specific narratives may be abstracted, compared, or mobilized in policy contexts without adequate attention to the social, cultural, or historical conditions under which those accounts were produced, increasing the risk of misinterpretation or harm. This is not to suggest that ethical standards and practices from other countries cannot inform social work research. However, without attending to the social, relational, and contextual foundations of social work, such borrowing risks detaching ethical review from the lived realities and power relations that qualitative social work research is meant to engage.

A call for international standards reflects a desire for shared ethical accountability and comparability, yet it also raises contradictions. How can global standards avoid reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge? How can ethical oversight and methodological validation respect local norms while maintaining universal human rights principles? These questions underscore the tension between universal ethics and local autonomy that must guide any conversation about international qualitative standards.

The challenge: The creation of international standards in qualitative social work research

Social work research should contribute to a deeper understanding of complex social problems and make a meaningful difference in the lives of individuals, communities, and societies. The idea of creating international standards in qualitative social work research offers both promise and risk. On one hand, such standards could help align the qualitative research we do with the core values of the profession: respect for human dignity, protection of human rights, and pursuit of social justice (see International Code of Ethics for the Professional Social Worker, 1985). On the other hand, because the world is facing unprecedented levels of misinformation, data misuse, and research illiteracy, the development of internationally coherent qualitative social work research standards is more pressing than ever.

Misinformation

First, the rise of misinformation threatens the basic integrity of scholarly and practice-based knowledge. For example, research indicates that social media platforms play a major role in the spread of misleading content: one study found that social media-based misinformation undermines trust in credible experts and organizations (Denniss and Lindberg, 2025). Survey findings from 2022 to 2023 from Canadians reported that 73 percent of respondents had seen content they suspected to be false or inaccurate in the past 12 months, and over 40 percent reported that it was becoming harder to distinguish true from false information, with literacy and age being associated with fact-checking behaviour (Bilodeau and Khalid, 2024). Furthermore, with the growth of large language models, distinguishing credible from misleading information has become increasingly complex, as these systems can generate confident but inaccurate summaries, interpretations, or citations, and can reinforce echo chambers and bias by reproducing dominant patterns present in their training data (Augenstein et al., 2024; Shao, 2025). This matters for global social work research, because if contextual findings are misinterpreted, misrepresented, or misused within practice or policy contexts (especially in vulnerable or low-resource settings), the potential for harm is real.

Data misuse

Second, data misuse is a growing problem in research broadly – and qualitative social work research is not immune. Scholars in information science define ‘data misuse’ as the intentional or negligent misuse of research data (e.g. selective reporting, mis-analysis, or ignoring consent and ownership rights) and propose frameworks to understand it (Pasquetto et al., 2024). This risk is particularly pronounced in international contexts, where concepts such as ‘evidence-based’ practice are frequently applied without sufficient attention to population, setting, or epistemic scope. Interventions and approaches validated within specific cultural, clinical, or social contexts may be presented as universally applicable, despite limited or absent evidence of relevance elsewhere (Dusin et al., 2023; Evans et al., 2019). When evidence is treated as transferable without contextual justification, qualitative findings can be distorted in ways that legitimize practices misaligned with local needs, values, or ethical commitments.

Without clear standards governing the necessity, governance, ownership, disclosure, and dissemination of qualitative research, such distortions are difficult to anticipate or contest. In these conditions, qualitative social work risks inadvertently reinforcing power imbalances, exploiting communities, or producing findings that are misunderstood or misapplied across policy and practice settings.

These challenges are further intensified by the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in qualitative research processes. AI-assisted tools for transcription, translation, coding, and analysis can obscure data flows, introduce new risks to confidentiality and consent, and reinforce dominant epistemic frames embedded in their training data. At present, there is limited consensus regarding the appropriate use of AI in qualitative social work research, and guidance varies substantially across institutions, disciplines, and national contexts. In international research contexts, where regulatory regimes, digital infrastructure, and access to secure technologies vary widely, the use of AI may heighten risks of decontextualization, data extraction, and loss of local control over qualitative data. Without clear standards governing the ethical use of AI, such tools may amplify existing forms of data misuse rather than mitigate them, particularly for researchers and communities in low-resource or marginalized settings (Jamil et al., 2025; Marshall and Naff, 2024).

Research literacy and participatory research

Globally, there are pronounced gaps in research literacy. While research literacy broadly understood implies that research is a core competency in social work training (Anderson, 2025; Drisko, 2014; Kwong, 2017), in reality, many practitioners, community members, policymakers, and even researchers lack the skills necessary to critically engage with, interpret, or apply research findings (Dinscore and Gonzalez, 2024).

These gaps have important implications across qualitative social work research; however, they are very pronounced in participatory and community-engaged research. In international contexts, differences in education systems, language, and access to research infrastructure can shape who can meaningfully participate in knowledge production. While participatory action research, knowledge co-production, and user- or community-led research are often presented as mechanisms for addressing power imbalances in social work research (Barbera, 2008; Sapouna, 2021), without sufficient attention to research literacy, governance, and shared decision-making, participatory approaches risk becoming tokenistic (Ross et al., 2023). Research agendas, methodological choices, and analytic frameworks are frequently determined in advance within academic institutions, with lived experience experts and community members invited to participate only after key decisions have been made. In such cases, participation functions less as co-production and more as post hoc legitimation of research outcomes.

This problem is not confined to the Global South. Across both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, marginalized communities and social classes experience the devaluation of their knowledge systems, including local ways of knowing and meaning-making that do not align with dominant academic conventions. When participatory research does not include transparent explanations of research processes in accessible and culturally meaningful ways, opportunities to build research capacity, or mechanisms for communities to interpret, contest, and apply findings, it may inadvertently reproduce the very epistemic hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. From an international perspective, these challenges highlight the need to distinguish between participatory practices in name and participatory practices in substance. Standards for qualitative social work research that emphasize participation without addressing research literacy, shared authority, and accountability risk reinforce inequities under the language of inclusion.

The risk: International standards as (another) project of coloniality

Combined, these three forces of misinformation, data misuse, and research illiteracy can place qualitative social work research in a precarious position. Without standards, research risks are ignored, misapplied, or even weaponized in policy and practice. Conversely, well-designed standards can act as a scaffold: they can support research literacy, encourage transparent methods, require reflexive disclosures of methods and positionality, and mandate equitable knowledge mobilization and dissemination practices. In other words, standards can guard against evidential distortion and promote methodological clarity by making expectations explicit and consistent across contexts. However, while the pursuit of international standards in qualitative social work research may seem a natural progression in a globalized profession, it is essential to recognize the potential for such efforts to become, intentionally or not, a colonial project.

Coloniality is a term that denotes that long-standing patterns of power resulting from colonialism can define culture, labour, and knowledge production (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Smith (1999) and Mignolo (2011) have brought attention to how colonial structures of power, knowledge, and being, those often being Western and English-speaking, are institutionally privileged. This is the risk that international standards can have: that is, reflecting only a Western worldview.

Epistemological dominance and methodological imperialism

Standardization, when designed in the Global North and exported globally, can easily reinforce epistemic hierarchies. For decades, social work scholarship from the Global South has been underrepresented in international journals, not because of poor quality, but because it fails to conform to Western conventions of theory-building, evidence presentation, and academic English (Gray and Webb, 2013; Patel, 2015). Smith (1999) has long been cautioning that research frameworks and terminologies that appear neutral are often embedded with cultural assumptions that position Indigenous and local knowledges as ‘less scientific’ or appropriating Indigenous knowledges without providing credit (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021).

For qualitative social work research, this risk is profound. Our discipline relies on contextual interpretation and co-construction of meaning. Imposing standardized templates for validity, coding, or reporting, without room for adaptation, could potentially privilege positivist traditions and marginalizes relational, narrative, or spiritual epistemologies (Seymour& Janse van Rensburg, 2023). For example, Indigenous research methodologies often prioritize story, ceremony, and reciprocity over linear analysis or textual reporting (Datta, 2018). A rigid international standard could inadvertently delegitimize such approaches in the name of comparability or ‘rigour’ (Datta, 2018; Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021)

Governance and authorship inequities

Even well-intentioned efforts to build global networks can perpetuate colonial relationships if power is not shared equitably. Questions must be asked: Who decides what constitutes ‘ethical’ or ‘high-quality’ research? Who sits at the table where standards are written? Too often, scholars and practitioners from the Global South or Indigenous communities are consulted but not granted decision-making authority or recognition in authorship. Tuck and Yang (2012) argue decolonization is not a metaphor. It requires the actual redistribution of power and control. Without structural mechanisms that ensure shared governance, the creation of ‘international’ standards risks replicating the same extractive logic that once characterized colonial research: data and stories flowing outward, recognition and authority flowing back to dominant institutions. As social work develops in an international context, most peer-reviewed social work journals continue to use the English language as the lingua franca.

A call for discussion: Flexible principles and ethics guided by of epistemic freedom and epistemic justice

As qualitative social work research continues to develop in an increasingly international and interconnected world, the creation of international standards in qualitative research could strengthen ethical accountability and methodological transparency. However, such standards may be more productively understood as principles. Rather than prescribing rules to be universally applied, principles can serve as orienting guides that support qualitative social work researchers in navigating complex ethical, methodological, and contextual decisions. Importantly, these principles allow for multiple and contextually grounded ways of conducting qualitative social work research. Importantly, such principles should be grounded in ethics guided by epistemic freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) and epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007).

Epistemology, broadly defined, concerns the nature of knowledge: how we come to know and what counts as knowing. Central to epistemology is the question of what science and research should address (Rosenberg, 2011). Epistemic freedom does not imply freedom from epistemology, but rather freedom within it. It is the freedom to select and practise epistemologies that are relevant, contextually grounded, and useful for advancing social change. It is the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, and develop methodologies from one’s own location and worldview, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. This concept extends beyond academic autonomy; it embodies the collective right of communities, scholars, and practitioners to generate knowledge from their own lived realities, cultural histories, and value systems – free from external domination and epistemic control (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018).

Epistemic justice adds to this by attending to how power shapes whose knowledge is recognized, legitimized, and taken seriously within research processes and outcomes. Epistemic injustice occurs when individuals or groups are wronged specifically in their capacity as knowers, most notably through testimonial injustice, where credibility is unjustly deflated, and hermeneutical injustice, where shared interpretive resources are insufficient to make sense of lived experience. In international contexts, the risks of epistemic injustice are heightened when research standards privilege particular methodological traditions or evidentiary hierarchies, thereby constraining what can be known, how it can be known, and whose interpretations are deemed authoritative (Fricker, 2007). Epistemic justice acknowledges that dominant epistemological frameworks can marginalize local, Indigenous, or practice-based ways of knowing and subordinate the epistemic contributions of research participants and communities (Bellingham et al., 2021; Hutton and Cappellini, 2022). As qualitative social work research applies a lens of situated, co-constructed knowledge, we require attention to positionality, power, and an ethics of care in researcher–participant interactions (D’Cruz, 2000; Reich, 2021).

Ethics guided by epistemic freedom and epistemic justice must therefore be central to any conversation about international qualitative principles. Epistemic freedom recognizes that the legitimacy of knowledge cannot be confined to Western paradigms or English-language publication. It affirms that the relational, spiritual, and narrative modes of inquiry that characterize Indigenous and community-based research are not ‘alternatives’ to rigorous science. These approaches are rigorous in their own right. Embedding epistemic freedom in international standards requires humility: it means acknowledging that no single framework can capture the complexity of how human beings construct meaning, resist oppression, and pursue justice across contexts. Epistemic justice provides social work qualitative research with relational accountability, reflexivity, and respect for diverse knowledge systems, while resisting the imposition of universalized epistemological norms.

Rather than standards understood as universally prescriptive requirements, social work could develop shared principles that function as orienting points for qualitative researchers, while allowing for diverse and contextually appropriate ways of achieving ethical and methodological aims. These principles would emphasize reflexivity, transparency, and co-governance rather than methodological conformity. Researchers could be encouraged to disclose positionality, document community engagement, and justify their methodological decisions in relation to local cultural ethics. Reviewers and editors would be tasked not with enforcing uniformity but with assessing how well each study aligns with social work’s core values of human dignity, social justice, and collective well-being.

Such principles would not prescribe specific methods or analytic frameworks; instead, they support researchers in making contextually responsible judgements that recognize participants, communities, and local scholars as epistemic agents. In this way, a principles-based approach aligns ethical responsibility with epistemic responsibility, reinforcing the argument that international qualitative social work research requires guidance that is flexible, reflexive, and attentive to power, rather than standardization alone.

Ultimately, the creation of international principles for qualitative social work research represents an opportunity not merely to codify method, but to foster a global dialogue that confronts coloniality, redresses historical inequities, and uplifts the diverse ways of knowing that have long sustained marginalized communities. Building on this commentary’s central argument, its unique contribution lies in proposing ethics guided by epistemic freedom and epistemic justice as the foundation for developing international qualitative research principles. This framework advances social work by demonstrating that flexible, co-governed, and culturally specific approaches can strengthen ethical accountability, promote methodological pluralism, and prevent the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in knowledge production. By grounding such principles in epistemic freedom and epistemic justice, qualitative social work research can become both globally coherent and contextually grounded: enabling practitioners, educators, and policymakers to engage in ethically responsive, socially just, and inclusive research practice. It is in this spirit that the plenary conversation continues: an invitation to reimagine what it means to do qualitative social work research ethically, collaboratively, and across borders. As international scholars, practitioners, and communities, our task is not to seek uniformity, but to build shared understanding grounded in respect, reciprocity, and epistemic freedom.