My intentions in this article are two-fold: 1) to highlight some of the complexities related to beneficent research which social workers might encounter when doing fieldwork with transnational families in an unstructured environment; 2) to argue that efforts to bring about good for vulnerable respondents outside remedial social work settings may have to confront structures that maintain people in circumstances of injustice. Structural change, however, can hardly be achieved within the scope of fieldwork research relationships. Throughout I draw on my fieldwork experiences for illustrations.