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Description: Abstract Introduction: Students from four Swiss higher education universities in the French speaking part of Switzerland may have already conducted over 1000 studies in or on children’s homes. Assessing which challenges children’s homes researchers have faced in the past could provide meaningful and practical information on how to design and conduct future children’s home research in Switzerland and similar settings. Objectives: To investigate challenges faced when conducting research in or on children’s homes (in Europe, Switzerland, the USA, Australia or the UK). Study design: Qualitative evidence synthesis (non-systematic) Methods: A thematic summary of challenges and facilitators identified when scoping the international literature was conducted given limited guidance was provided about reuse of data found within Swiss bachelor theses from HETS Valais. On August 19, 2020 Google Scholar was searched using keywords for 2 constructs: children’s homes and challenges; articles deemed potentially relevant to answer the research question were read in full, along with their forward citations and data on research barriers and research facilitators was sought from the reports. A further 30 articles from the journal Residential Treatment for Children & Youth were read in full and data extracted similarly. Salient themes across studies and settings were then synthesized in lists and a table. Findings: Thirty-eight (n=38) articles found through Google Scholar searches were selected for synthesis after full-text assessment, along with twelve (n=12) articles from Residential Treatment for Children & Youth. Most articles reported challenges when conducting research in the USA. Fifty-five (n=55) barriers or challenges were purposively selected from extracted data for presentation along with twenty-three (n=23) facilitators. Challenges and facilitators identified were ethical, financial, logistical, psychological, organizational, social, legal and methodological. Limitations: Perspectives from parents of children in care, children’s homes managers and child welfare caseworkers may have been missed or be less emphasized in this report. Findings were intentionally summarized superficially. Discussion: Only two Switzerland-specific studies published in scientific journals reporting sparse data on challenges when conducting research in or on children’s homes could be found and the original analysis of bachelor theses could not be conducted. Nevertheless my personal experiences suggest findings would likely generalize to the Swiss setting. Funding: No funding was received for this work. Registration and study protocol: See previous versions via https://osf.io/xvunh/. Data and materials: See https://osf.io/m6qtz/. All other data should otherwise be included within this manuscript. Keywords: Children’s homes, residential care, barriers, challenges, research conduct