Our collection of chapters is drawn from a two-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series, during which a range of statutory and voluntary organisations and refugees met to focus on methodological issues relating to research that sets out to elicit views of refugee people on service development and research. This book is not intended as a literature review of current research with refugees. Readers looking for this may be interested in the review by Castles et al (2002) and the website of the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (www.icar.org.uk). The value of involving refugees in research was taken as given in the seminar series and in writing the chapters for this book.

Rather than ‘asylum seeker’, we use the terms ‘refugee’ or ‘refugee people seeking asylum’ in their broadest senses in this chapter to make the point that, irrespective of where individual people may be in relation to their claims for asylum, they are all seeking refuge from persecution and, like everyone else, they have many other roles: they are mothers, sisters, fathers and brothers. We are not interested in how many people the government feels should be allowed to stay in the UK or in the different labels it uses to categorise people as deserving or otherwise. Where other contributors use different terms in their own chapters, we have kept these.

Some authors in this collection write about minority ethnic communities generally, which they see as including refugees. Refugees can become part of established minority ethnic communities. Some communities that are now defined as minority ethnic communities were originally refugees and sometimes still define themselves as such. The Polish communities in England are one such example. Researchers working with minority ethnic communities often include refugee people seeking asylum within their research, sometimes without realising they are refugees until the research is under way. We are not arguing that recent refugees seeking asylum have identical issues to longer-established groups or that all of them have established communities they can become involved with (Alexander et al, 2004). There may be tensions within communities, as well as additional sensitivities around legal status that may lead to access and trust (Hynes, 2003) issues for researchers.