Questions that do not require extracting children
A research question before Bali should be answerable with observation of your own team, public visitor sites, and published sources. Good: How does a dress code change volunteer behavior? How do free afternoons compete with teaching energy? What is the difference between a ticketed campus visit and a placement? Bad: What is the trauma narrative of this class? How poor are they? Can I test a method on these children without a host?
There is no orphanage in the source itinerary. Do not invent one as a research site. Green School is a ticketed visitor geography in the guidebook, not your lab. Temples have rules; they are not backdrops for methods chapters.
Ethics review
If your school has an IRB-like process, use it. If not, use the ethics page as a minimum: no names of children, no covert recording, host veto, short time on site. Bali Context Studio is the offering for this work. It is context for better teaching, not a career as an anthropologist of a week.
Write the question before you fly. If it only makes sense with a close-up of a child, it is not a journer question.
A question too big
“How does tourism affect Balinese identity?” is a career, not a week. Shrink it to “How did visitor crowds in Ubud change our team’s sign-out times?” That you can observe. Big questions tempt students to fake data. Small questions teach method.
Consent
Your teammates can consent to being in your notes. Host children cannot consent in a way this week can honor if you need their stories. So do not need their stories. Need your own conduct.
Sharing findings without extracting
Share in the showcase: “We learned our sign-out times slipped when Ubud crowds were thick, so we moved leisure earlier.” Do not share a gallery of people who did not consent to be your data. If a teacher asks for generalizable claims about Bali, refuse. A week cannot carry that. Methodological humility is part of the question, not a weakness in the answer.
If you later write a college essay, the research question should still be about your conduct or your team’s system, not about “them.” Admissions readers have seen the other essay. They have not seen as many about a failed game and a host’s timetable. Be the second kind.
Questions about money
You may ask, carefully, how visitor tickets in the guidebook chapter sit outside the program. You may not ask a host what they earn. You may not ask a child what their family owns. Money questions that point at tourism flows are studio-appropriate. Money questions that point at a household are not. If you cannot tell the difference, pick a different question.
Do not use exchange-rate curiosity as a way to joke about “cheap” labor. Jokes about cheapness are an ethics fail that will show up in a showcase if you do not kill them in the notes.
If your discipline requires household interviews, this week is the wrong method and Bali volunteer teaching is the wrong frame. Choose a different project. Do not smuggle it into a six-hour placement.
A question about weather
“How did rain change our brief?” is allowed. It uses your team as data and the sky as context. It does not need a child interview. If a student cannot think of a question that small, they are not ready to research. They are ready to pack.