Researchers, like everyone else on planet Earth, had no choice but to respond to the pandemic. Yet, again like everyone else, researchers had a lot of choice about how to respond. All three of the volumes in this series exemplify researchers at their best: reassessing their methods and approaches, with care for others and themselves, creatively and ethically. The separation of the volumes into different topics is to some extent an artificial device to support discussion and thought around these complex issues. Although the chapters you just read have been placed in this volume because they say more about response and reassessment than about ethics, creativity, resilience or care, the latter elements also run through these accounts.

We received more submissions about going digital – that is, moving in-person and in-place research online – than about any other sub-topic in this series. A sizeable number of these submissions were about switching from face-to-face interviewing to doing interviews online. This has already been covered in some detail in the methods literature: Hanna (2012) and Salmons (2015) are seminal contributors; there are many others. We didn't want to repeat that here, and we were fortunate also to have submissions exploring other aspects of going digital. Helena Vicente and her colleagues in the European Union needed to move planned face-to-face research encounters online, but at a rather different scale from interviews: they worked with large groups of students and experts forming science camps in six European countries, and devised a novel method of taking this work online. There is an English saying that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, and we can also see that in action in Emmanuel Ndhlovu's use of text messaging and voice notes for data gathering in rural Zimbabwe, and in Louise Couceiro's use of electronic ‘reader response toolkits’ in her UK research into children's reading. All these innovative approaches may well have utility beyond their initial contexts, not least because all the researchers found that, once the early challenges had been overcome, the methods they had chosen offered more advantages than disadvantages.

Mridulya Narasimhan, Jagannath R and Fabrizio Valenti researched different ways of doing survey research using computer-aided telephone interviews in India and Bangladesh. This method is notorious for low response rates, and their findings offer suggestions for increasing response rates while maximizing researcher productivity.