Evidence-informed, context-responsive, and insight-driven Methodological Guidance for Health Research Under Crisis Condition

Following the disruptions to research caused by the 2024–2025 war on Lebanon, and building on discussions initiated during the conference “Research in Crisis Settings”, The Office of Research at the American University of Beirut (AUB) recently established the Research and Crisis Interest Group (CRIS-IG). CRIS-IG is an international and interdisciplinary initiative, with one of its main objectives being producing evidence-informed context-responsive, and insight-driven guidance to support researchers, institutions, funders and ethics bodies navigating crisis conditions.
Its foundational work, including a forthcoming conceptual framework paper synthesizing crisis definitions across disciplinary traditions (Akl et al., forthcoming), identified three distinct interfaces between research and crisis: research in crisis, where crisis is the operating environment; research on crisis, where crisis is the object of inquiry; and research for crisis, where research is mobilized for crisis response. Across all three interfaces, guidance to researchers is either typically absent, fragmented, rarely validated, and developed almost entirely without the direct involvement of crisis-affected researchers and communities.
Th proposed project is a planned extension of CRIS-IG's foundational work. Building on the conceptual framework already developed, we propose to produce the first comprehensive, validated suite of methodological guidance for health research in, on and for crisis. The guidance would be developed with and validated by crisis-affected researchers and communities.