“Should I Send a Condolence Card?” Promoting Emotional Safety in Qualitative Health Research Through Reflexivity and Ethical Mindfulness

Abstract

We present a case study involving the unexpected deaths of two young people whose parents were taking part in a qualitative study concerning adolescents with chronic disease. We explore and highlight the ethically important moments, both procedural and emotional, and the implications for the research team, the ethics committee, and for qualitative health researchers more broadly. Our reflections are drawn from team discussion and analysis of the trainee researcher's responses to the situation. We focus on (a) reflexivity and ethical mindfulness as a strategy for enhancing emotional safety, (b) the concept of emotional safety for qualitative researchers, and (c) the procedural issues and emotional responses that led to engagement with the human research ethics committee and resulting changes in policy. The article concludes by proposing recommendations for the promotion of emotional safety in qualitative health research that is relevant for researchers, especially trainee researchers, as well as ethics committees.

The Emotional Risks of Turning Stories into Data: An Exploration of the Experiences of Qualitative Researchers Working on Sensitive Topics

“…However, the discomfort these unexpected intrusions continued to cause demonstrates how poorly de-briefed researchers were, both on the impact this type of research might have on them or how they might manage this. Furthermore, these revelations are in contrast to the positive 'personal growth' narratives that are so often evident in similar autoethnographic and biographical accounts of emotion in research [20,29]. Our sense, as conveners of the roundtable, was that their revelation within this peer setting reflected both the benefit of group discussion in opening up these issues, as well as the value of the anonymity afforded by the knowledge that the eventual reporting of this data would be undertaken by two authors unconnected to the researchers' original roles and supervisors.…”

“…Nevertheless, their findings are limited because in spite of Dickson-Swift et al's [25] call for empirical qualitative studies on researchers from a range of backgrounds and from other global contexts, many of the studies have been undertaken in a particular context [26]. Others continue to be dominated by single or dual authored accounts [27,28] or those based on teams of researchers working on the same project Bowtell et al [29]. The recent literature also shows a turn towards those that take an auto-ethnographic approach [19] or autobiographic accounts [8], with few researchers writing frankly about their experiences in accounts that are directly integrated within their methodology [30].…”

Introduction: researching death, dying and bereavement

“…Several authors also point to the fallibility of their pre-fieldwork 'preparations' (Rowling, 1999;Visser, 2016;Woodthorpe, 2007Woodthorpe, , 2009 and make recommendations regarding how to better support researchers undertaking future death-related research. They consider various reflexive practices, 'emotional safety protocols' (Bowtell, Sawyer, Aroni, Green, & Duncan, 2013) and aspects of self-care management (Rager, 2005), such as keeping a diary (Howarth, 1993;Valentine, 2007), scheduling plenty of time between interviews (Rowling, 1999), and taking part in regular debriefing opportunities (Rolls & Relf, 2006). However, as Visser (2016) notes, there is probably a limit to which one can ever be prepared for such work.…”

“…Their work can resonate with personal losses and exacerbate feelings of grief, and also prompt pertinent questions about professional roles and how researchers 'should' feel when their participants die (Visser, 2016) -including deliberations about 'appropriate' courses of action to take with implications for researchers and ethics committees (e.g. sending condolence cards, see Bowtell et al, 2013).…”

An exploration of the possibility for secondary traumatic stress among transcriptionists: a grounded theory approach

“…This is particularly important in qualitative research, which requires greater engagement with participants from the research team and can be sensitive in nature. It is essential to bear in mind that in qualitative work the process and the content cannot be separated into discrete elements as they necessarily interact with one another (Bowtell et al, 2013). This literature is still growing, but arguably has paid limited attention to the wellbeing of transcriptionists.…”