This practical guide aims to serve as a valuable resource for qualitative research on environment-migration linkages. It describes ways to design and execute qualitative research on the climate-migration nexus, from initiating and designing the study to developing a database of the results. 

Through bibliographic resources, concrete examples, and field-tested tools, this handbook provides practical guidance on: 

  • Designing qualitative interviews, including example sets of questions;
  • Developing and training a research team;
  • Choosing a sampling strategy;
  • Select interview partners, including example criteria;
  • Mainstreaming gender, social equity, and conflict considerations in all steps of the research, including by fostering a comfortable and safe interview setting;
  • Ethical considerations including data privacy;
  • Possible steps for qualitative content and thematic analysis;
  • Designing a qualitative database; and
  • Many more tips and bibliographic references.

This guide is intended for a wide audience, to foster an exchange of experiences and further refinement in methodologies for studying the interactions of environmental change and human mobility. 

This practical text is intended for students, researchers, educators, and practitioners, offering a practical reference for conducting fieldwork in this domain. Many of the tools presented below are intended to be implemented in multiple case study country with a view to producing cross-country analysis with some level of comparability.

Please note previous versions were titled: Handbook for Qualitative Interviews on the Climate-Migration Nexus (D4.1).