Scrolling Back With Mobile Queer International Students: Challenges and Strategies for Digital Methods in Researching Transnational Identity-Making

Qualitative research with transnational queer international students poses distinct ethical and methodological challenges. Participants’ identity practices span digital platforms with varying privacy norms; sexuality remains sensitive, heightening confidentiality risks during recruitment and data collection; and mobility constraints disrupt physical access to interview spaces. This article presents an agile, reflexive qualitative research toolkit developed with People’s Republic of China (PRC)-born queer female students living in Australia during COVID-19 lockdowns. Twenty cisgender female and gender-diverse individuals aged 20–34, encompassing those who identified as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, and others who resisted fixed labels, were purposively recruited through lesbian-centred, community-oriented social media channels and networks. The research design involved an initial in-depth semi-structured interview, followed by a scroll-back interview in which participants revisited and narrated self-selected social media posts and personal photographs. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, with translation, de-identification and the ethical management of visual materials and digital traces treated as core methodological tasks to prioritise participants’ safety and confidentiality. The article demonstrates the value of flexibility and participant-centred design in sensitive research with participants from marginalised groups. Recruiting through community channels enabled engagement across dispersed geographical and digital contexts, while lockdown conditions required ongoing methodological adjustment and reflexive decision-making. The adapted scroll-back approach elicited temporally expansive but specific narratives and generated bilingual, multimodal data that broadened what participants felt comfortable to share about identity, intimacy, and mobility. Reflexive attention to the researcher’s insider positionality supported rapport and culturally nuanced interpretation, while also foregrounding the emotional labour required to maintain analytical rigour. Together, these strategies show how ethical care, community engagement and methodological innovation can be integrated under shifting fieldwork conditions, offering a practical protocol for qualitative studies with intersectionally marginalised communities.