As Short (1984: 712) noted, there had been little research into ‘how people in fact live with risks and how living with risks affects their perceptions and behaviour’. Risk is an element of everyday life. We are taught to fear particular things and to cope with the potential negative or positive outcomes of our action and other events. Risk means that we may lose something valuable to win something else. In this research, risk was defined as a potentially undesirable outcome, which is socially interpreted as such.

Why study risk as illustrated among Ukrainian migrant women working in the Polish domestic work sector? A simple answer: no one has carried out such research so far. To put it in more explicit terms: the purpose of taking a risk approach to analyse the experience of Ukrainian migrant women in Poland's domestic work sector was to learn what irregular labour migration outcomes the migrants evaluate as a risk and how they respond to it. Also important is to ask what extent this applies to migrant domestic work – as a specific niche of the informal labour market. This approach allowed me to reach beyond research into migration in terms of its costs and opportunities, pointing to the complexity of decisions made during the actual migration process. What might seem a risky behaviour is not necessarily deemed as such by the migrant. ‘I am not a risk taker,’ declared one of my interviewees. She had circulated between Ukraine and Poland for several years, frequently having to cross the border and working in an undeclared fashion, with no guarantee of earning a wage, health insurance to protect her in the event of an accident or social security for her future. However, this woman managed to mediate the relationship between migration's possible negative and positive outcomes. In that sense, by migrating she took a risk. Without taking this risk and moving out of the security of their routine, the studied women could hardly have adapted to their changing environment. Migration – understood here as a form of voluntary risk-taking – did give them a sense of personal agency, of being in control of their own life, having successfully tackled potentially dangerous situations. Such behaviour opened new opportunities to the migrants.