Requirements are stricter for these groups and vary by field; work with both ethics committees and the current local regulations.
Home ethics committees ask thorough questions about vulnerable participants. What they rarely ask is who will be standing in the room when a participant feels unable to say no — and that person is usually your partner's field staff, not you.
Vulnerability that your protocol may not name
Beyond the standard categories, the situations that recur in fieldwork in Vietnam:
Patients recruited by the clinician treating them.
Employees recruited at their workplace, where a manager can see who participated.
Students recruited by their own teacher.
Ethnic minority communities, where language and differing understandings of research both apply.
Participants for whom your compensation is a meaningful sum relative to local income.
The common factor is not weakness. It is that declining carries a cost — or feels as though it does. A protocol that treats consent as a signature does not address this.
Separate recruitment from power
The practical fix is structural, not verbal: the person inviting participation and collecting data should not hold power over the participant.
That usually means budgeting for field staff who are not the treating clinician, the teacher, or anyone in the management line — and it means paying them properly. If your budget assumes the partner's clinicians will recruit their own patients because it is cheaper, the design is the problem.
Also ensure nobody in authority learns who participated. This is a data-handling requirement, not a promise.
Let your partner set the compensation level
Figures set from abroad go wrong in both directions: too low is exploitative, too high makes participation hard to refuse for people who need the money.
Your partner knows what is proportionate locally. Ask them, accept their figure, and budget for it — including travel costs, which are often the larger share for rural participants.
Incidental findings: decide before, not during
If your study measures anything health-related, you will eventually find something about an individual participant. Decide in advance: who is told, by whom, and what referral pathway exists.
This has to be worked out with your partner, because the referral pathway is local and they are the ones who will be asked. Leaving it undecided means your field staff improvise under pressure, and the participant's interest is the thing most likely to be lost.
Budget for it. A referral that requires the participant to travel and pay is not a referral.
Reporting back to participants and the community
Agree at the outset whether participants will learn the results, in what form, and who delivers them.
A short plain-language summary in Vietnamese, returned to the community, costs very little. Omitting it is what turns a study into extraction in the eyes of the people who hosted it — and it makes life harder for every researcher who comes after you, including your partner.
Write the translation and dissemination time into the budget, or it will not happen once the grant closes.
After the study ends
Three things to settle while there is still funding to cover them:
When identifiable data is deleted, and who is accountable for doing it.
Who answers if a participant makes contact in two years — realistically, your partner. Agree that this is their role and that it was resourced.
If the study demonstrates an intervention works, whether the participating community gets access to it. International ethics guidance is consistent that leaving them without access is the outcome to avoid, and this needs a plan rather than an intention.
Dual review, in practice
Both committees will review, and they may ask for different things — a consent form your committee considers complete may be unusable locally, or vice versa.
Submit in parallel, share each committee's comments with the other side, and expect one or two revision rounds. Build the time in; if your fieldwork dates cannot absorb it, move the dates rather than starting before approvals are complete.
Starting early exposes your partner, who is physically present and institutionally accountable, far more than it exposes you.
The question worth asking yourself
For each protection in your protocol, ask: who has to enforce this in the room, and have we given them the standing and the resources to do it?
If the answer is that a junior local staff member must refuse a request from a senior clinician, the protection exists on paper only. That is fixable at the design stage, and very difficult to fix once fieldwork has begun.
Who counts as vulnerable in practice?
Beyond standard categories: patients recruited by their clinician, employees recruited at work, students recruited by their teacher, minority communities, and anyone for whom your compensation is a meaningful sum.
How should recruitment be structured?
So that the person inviting participation holds no power over the participant — which usually means budgeting for independent field staff and paying them properly.
Who should set participant compensation?
Your partner, who knows what is proportionate locally. Budget their figure, including travel costs.
What must be decided before data collection?
The incidental-findings pathway — who is told, by whom, and what referral exists — worked out with the partner and funded.
