Researching Care Platforms: Methodological and Ethical Considerations in the Broad Field of Domestic Platform Labour

Abstract

This article presents a methodological reflection on the challenges of researching domestic and care work mediated by digital labour platforms. While knowledge production on gig work in the logistics sector has soared, research on care platforms is slow to catch up, especially in very relational forms of home-based work, such as eldercare. We take this uneven development in the literature as a starting point to unpack the empirical conundrums in this field. Drawing on our own experience with trying to recruit care platform workers in Germany between 2019 and 2024, we shed light on the ethical dilemmas we encountered and offer some lessons learnt. The article calls for long-term commitments, multi-sited ethnographies, longitudinal perspectives and mixed-methods designs to study care platforms in the future. Finally, we advocate for researching platform labour beyond the gig.