Approaching Transnational Social Protection: Methodological Challenges and Empirical Applications

Transnational social spaces are multidimensional in terms of the socio-spatial categories - that is, local, global, and national - and different actors and institutions involved. Recent developments in transnational methodology argue for a thorough reflection on the challenges of methodological nationalism, essentialism, and researchers' positionality. Therefore, in designing and conducting transnational research, reflections on methodological challenges become a crucial step. Yet, as these challenges often remain to be discussed on a methodological level, their implementation still needs to be set out clearly to be useful for empirical research in transnational social spaces such as on social protection. For that reason, we discuss transnational research designs as well as different methods of data collection and analysis. We argue for a multisited and mixed-method research design, which includes the emigration and the immigration countries, as well as the involvement of research teams located across borders. Thereby, a combination of perspectives between emigration and immigration countries in transnational social spaces can be achieved.