Researching sensitive topics: qualitative research as emotion work

By Virginia Dickson-Swift, E. James, S. Kippen, Pranee Liamputtong. 2009

529 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a growing awareness that undertaking qualitative research is an embodied experience and that researchers may be emotionally affected by the work that they do. Despite the interest in the emotional nature of qualitative research, there is very little empirical evidence about the researchers' experiences of undertaking qualitative research. A grounded theory analysis of one-on-one interviews with thirty public health researchers working on a qualitative project provided both theoretical and empirical evidence that qualitative researchers undertake emotion work throughout their research projects. The findings provide examples of researchers doing emotion work in their research projects; highlight some of the consequences of emotion work and offer some suggestions for researcher self-care.

Subfields: Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6e8cc854f032089a35e0b11e0bf3d9312a72e5d

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Ward
2. R. McMurray

Citations in the corpus

• ‘Why would you want to do that?’: Defining emotional dirty work (2014, background): “We experienced the ‘vicarious trauma’ that can be evoked by research on sensitive topics, along with the potential for exhaustion that can arise from such work (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009).”