ABSTRACT
Neelam Sukhramani takes the reader through her research endeavours with children experiencing adversities. As a social work educator for the past two and a half decades, she has been privileged to be concurrently engaged in teaching, research, and practice. The chapter recounts the ways in which she optimally utilises the thoroughfare among the three. She draws her reflections from her doctoral work, her role as a mentor to doctoral students and other professionals, as well as through her engagement in funded research. She shares the ethical dilemmas of a child rights researcher in the absence of adequate child protection mechanisms in India. She recounts the diverse ways in which researchers need to demonstrate their accountability towards the research participants. The journey helps to draw critical lessons for policy as well as desirable structural changes. She believes that social work educators’ concurrent engagement in research and practice strengthen their classroom transactions as well as fieldwork supervision. She concludes that the primary purpose of social work research is to stimulate policy and practice and thus it becomes relevant to design research in a manner that this purpose gets fulfilled.
