Coping with distressing research: Emotional engagement and researcher well-being

Introduction

Ethical literature and evaluation of research projects typically focus on addressing how being part of research can be emotionally burdening for its participants. This is particularly the case when research topics deal with potentially distressing topics, such as violence, trauma, forced displacement, captivity, or children's well-being. Nonetheless, scholars increasingly note that researchers themselves may experience emotional strain, vulnerability, or long-term negative impacts (Dickson-Swift et al., 2008; Hubbard et al., 2001; Kidd and Finlayson, 2006; McGarrol, 2017; Schmidt et al., 2023; Smith, 2025). While it is essential to consider the potential impacts of research on participants and communities, ethically sustainable research must also concern the researchers themselves, who may be profoundly affected by the research that they conduct (e.g., Fenge et al., 2019; Hordge-Freeman, 2018; Hubbard et al., 2001).

Scholars across disciplines have pointed to a lack of recognition for researchers’ emotional engagement within the formal structures of academia and institutional settings (Dickson-Swift et al., 2008; Fenge et al., 2019; McGarrol, 2017). As researchers’ emotions are rarely included in early-career research training or ethical review processes, they can end up managing their emotional dilemmas alone. Greater recognition of emotional engagement in research may help researchers cope more effectively with the emotional demands of their work and encourage them to regard their emotional responses as meaningful and informative for their research (Hordge-Freeman, 2018; Nicholson, 2009). Moreover, acknowledging these emotions can help researchers take better care of their well-being and enhance their ability to work.

Our own research experiences span a range of sensitive topics and methodological approaches. Elina Turjanmaa has studied intergenerational trauma and forced migration, including interviews with displaced persons and their descendants. Sisko Piippo has focused on domestic violence, social work responses, and researcher positionality in ethically complex field settings. Alexa Hepburn has worked extensively with recordings of child protection helpline calls, medical and clinical interaction and family mealtimes, analyzing emotionally charged sequences involving crying, anger, and institutional responses. While our data sources and relationships with participants differ, each of us has encountered moments where the research process has generated emotional complexity, ethical tension, and deep reflection.

Motivated by these experiences, we organized a 2-hr pre-conference workshop in 2025 titled ‘Research Topics That Get Under Your Skin - Coping with Distressing Topics in Your Work'. The session included reflections from the panel, structured small-group discussions, and a feedback discussion. The workshop filled quickly, and its usefulness was widely recognized by the participants. It aimed to offer researchers and students an opportunity to reflect on their experiences of engaging with difficult topics and the role of emotions in research, as well as to share strategies they had used to process their own research-related emotions. The workshop was neither conducted as part of a research project nor designed as a formal data-gathering exercise; instead, it served as a space for shared reflection. None of the discussion was recorded, therefore, the insights we draw here do not represent systematic findings but collective observations, concerns, and practices that emerged in conversation.

The participants’ feedback reflected our own experience: emotional strain is an unavoidable aspect of research work that researchers are expected to handle without institutional support. The opportunity to reflect openly on emotional responses to research was rare for many attendees, most of whom had found themselves unexpectedly affected during the research process. Many participants expressed strong appreciation for having a space to speak candidly about the emotional impact of their research. Several noted that they had never discussed the emotional toll of follow-up interviews or the accumulated impact of studying long-term structural issues in young people's lives, or the distress of engaging with online or archival materials containing abuse, racism, or hostility.

Attendees shared specific moments of distress, such as delaying transcription of difficult interviews, avoiding rewatching upsetting recordings, or feeling complicit when writing about injustices they could not redress. One participant described the moral fatigue of repeated interviews with at-risk youth; some reflected on the embodied discomfort of working with emotionally or ideologically charged data in isolated conditions, and many shared fears about political backlash or harassment when publishing on polarizing topics.

Guilt and discomfort also emerged when participants considered the asymmetry between themselves and those they studied, particularly in contexts where they were unable to act or intervene. One researcher described the moment of leaving a prison interview as a turning point in their understanding of ethical obligation. Another recounted analyzing refugee narratives online and feeling disturbed by the inability to respond or offer support. These reflections were not merely confessional, but revealed how emotional responses emerge in context, shaped by method, topic, power dynamics, and institutional conditions.

While researcher positionality and reciprocity are discussed in qualitative research ethics (e.g., De Kock et al., 2025; Loveridge et al., 2023; Sobočan et al., 2019), many participants felt that training and formal protocols had not prepared them for these embodied, affective dilemmas. There was broad agreement that researcher emotion deserves recognition not only as a burden to be managed but as a generative resource for insight. These collective reflections set the stage for a closer look at how sensitivity is theorized in research.

Conceptualizing sensitivity in research

In this Note, we start from the widely shared observation in the field: that the research process can be emotionally demanding and at times exhausting. Definitions of “sensitive research” often center on the harm or threat that research may inflict on or pose to those involved (Dickson-Swift et al., 2008, 2). Lee (1993, 5) offers a helpful typology of such threats: “intrusive threats,” which relate to violations of privacy, “sanction threats,” which refer to the risk of stigma or other negative consequences for participants, and “political threats,” which emerge when research engages in contentious or conflictual social and political issues.

Our understanding of sensitive research is broader; it includes any topic that holds personal significance, whether for the participants or for the researcher. Evaluating potential harm or threat of a research topic can be difficult. Even seemingly neutral research topics may become emotionally charged over the course of a project, particularly as the researcher's personal connection to the material develops (see, e.g., Hanna, 2018). Indeed, researchers have long noted that the sensitivity of a topic is not a fixed property but is shaped by context and perspective. As Lee and Renzetti (1990, 512) point out, “It is possible for any topic, depending on context, to be a sensitive one.” However, while contextual factors matter, some research topics are more likely to be experienced as sensitive than others, especially topics that concern people's private life, deeply personal experiences, power and social control, and issues that are experienced as sacred by a study's participants (Lee and Renzetti, 1990, 512).

Building on the literature and incorporating our workshop reflections, we now explore how emotional engagement arises at different points in the research process. We organize our reflections around stages of the process: selecting a topic, conducting and analyzing research, managing postresearch dilemmas, and building supportive and collegial research communities.

“Why am I doing this?” Emotions in the choice of a research topic

Emotional engagement often begins with the selection of a research topic. As Jamieson et al. (2023) note, reflexivity ideally begins at this early stage, inviting researchers to consider why a particular topic matters to them (or to society) and why they may be best positioned to study it (on researcher positionality, see, e.g., Fenge et al., 2019). What is regarded as meaningful and important often carries emotional significance. Researchers often choose topics that personally resonate with them. However, such resonance does not necessarily stem from direct personal experience; rather, it may reflect the researcher's moral and value-based commitment to addressing social injustice, inequality, or discrimination through research.

Topics that a researcher considers emotionally distant in the beginning may become highly meaningful during the research process. Moreover, the researcher's relationship to the research topic and interaction with the participants can change for personal reasons. For example, the researcher's emotional experience of studying child abusers may change after becoming a parent. Hanna (2018, 527) suggests keeping notes on not just general reflections but also emotional responses (see also Smith, 2025) and evolving reflections as a good way to track how emotional engagement develops across a project.

According to the workshop participants, assumptions of personal involvement can, in themselves, become sources of emotional strain, particularly when others presume that a researcher must have lived experience of a topic, or they question the latter's scholarly motivations. Some participants also described the discomfort of working with politically charged or morally troubling topics, where the emotional toll did not stem from the content itself but from the broader implications and reactions that such work can provoke.

More broadly, choosing to study sensitive or politically charged issues can expose researchers to online abuse, including targeted harassment or hate speech intended to discredit or silence them, which may ultimately deter further research on such topics. Also, as social and political contexts can shift during the research process, a topic that initially appears neutral may become contentious due to, for example, changes in political power, illustrating how the sensitivity of a topic is shaped in relation to its social context (Lee, 1993, 5).

“Do I have to keep distance/am I too close?” Methods and emotional engagement

The research methods that we select can influence how emotionally demanding the research process becomes. In qualitative research, it is more likely that the researcher gains close access to the participants’ lived experiences, emotions, and embodied knowledge. This proximity can also affect the researcher on a personal level. However, no method of data collection or analysis excludes the possibility for the researcher to experience emotions such as sadness, compassion, or anxiety and to feel burdened by the topic under study.

The experiences of our workshop participants, including ourselves, reflect researchers’ emotions that extend beyond the methods of ethnography or interview studies. Using pre-existing materials such as legal texts, court decisions, blog posts, video recordings, or archival sources can also be emotionally burdening and may require researchers to regulate how much time one spends with the material each day. Immersing oneself in literature that deals with the darker aspects of human nature can likewise be heavy or overwhelming unless the intensity of the work on such topics is consciously moderated from time to time. Hanna (2018, 527) describes how a researcher analyzing pre-existing research material, such as online discussions, may not be “prepared for the depth of feeling and extent of the emotional labor during the research.” It is therefore important to acknowledge that selecting a particular type of data or research method does not necessarily correspond to a greater or lesser emotional burden in the research process.

While researchers may try to be prepared for heavy or surprising content, ethically demanding research settings unavoidably involve a degree of uncertainty. In research interviews, for example, the researcher encounters and receives difficult life experiences and the emotional weight they may carry. Interviews can also take unexpected turns. The researcher cannot fully anticipate the emotional reactions of the interviewee, one's own emotional responses, or the extent to which the interview itself may affect the participant. In the context of interviews, the importance of building rapport has been stressed, highlighting questions of reciprocity, sharing, and trust, as well as the recognition of boundaries (e.g., Dickson-Swift, 2006).

In the workshop, we discussed how researchers could more consciously navigate between caring about their research subject and analyzing it critically. For instance, in an interview situation, it is not necessary to fully empathize with the interviewee's emotional world at every moment; empathy can be situationally adjusted to the circumstances. While this may be self-evident in therapeutic work, such considerations are rarely addressed in research practice, and issues related to emotional regulation or empathetic interaction are typically not included in teaching research methods.

Our workshop participants also described moments where they delayed transcription or analysis because certain recordings or texts felt emotionally overwhelming. One researcher commented that their distress did not arise from overt trauma but from the subtle, sustained moral discomfort of analyzing politically charged or hostile interactions.

Along with the aspects of emotional burden and the negative sides of a researcher's emotions, the positive feelings as part of the research process were discussed in the workshop. Joy, happiness, or relief could co-exist with sadness, anger, or guilt. Emotions were interpreted as important clues guiding researchers throughout the research process. In this framework, negative emotions could also be viewed as functional for their work. Researchers’ unpleasant emotions can even lead the analysis process (see, e.g., Schmidt et al., 2023) to help them grasp what is important, provide theoretical insights, and affect the ways of doing research.

Emotions often guide researchers toward compelling observations and influence both the analysis and the entire research process. Researchers’ emotions can serve as valuable clues, yet this point is rarely articulated in research articles or methodological literature. Indeed, researcher emotions are sometimes framed as a threat to scientific objectivity, with researchers encouraged to maintain emotional detachment and preserve neutrality. However, from a reflexive qualitative perspective, we argue that emotional responses can act as important epistemic resources. Rather than compromising rigour, attending to emotional responses can sharpen reflexivity and open new interpretive paths.

“Did I do enough?” Postfieldwork ethical dilemmas

Difficult emotions that qualitative researchers can encounter in face-to-face interactions with research participants or with coresearchers in participatory oriented studies can include feelings of guilt, vulnerability, and exhaustion (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007). Our workshop participants reflected on their feelings of guilt and shame stemming from their more privileged positions than those of the interviewees. These emotions often relate to ethical dilemmas, including leaving the research field and being unable to “do enough” for the participants and their communities (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007).

For example, conducting an interview on deeply sensitive issues in a prison setting may leave researchers with a lingering sense of emptiness, shaped by the asymmetry between their exiting the space freely and the interviewee having to remain behind locked doors. The question of “what happens next” can also disturb researchers in the context of online research where they cannot meet the participants yet feel empathy for their life situations and stories (Hanna, 2018).

Particularly when working with self-collected data, researchers have a responsibility for their participants. Researchers should aim to support the interests of the study participants or coresearchers in socially disadvantaged positions, as well as their communities, and ensure that the research does not harm the participants or worsen the situation of the group being studied. The demand for researchers’ reasonable availability (e.g., De Kock et al., 2025), a common starting point in refugee studies, can also raise questions about the researchers’ boundaries in supporting and assisting the participants. Generally, these ethical principles are often not problematic in themselves, but the reflections they prompt can lead to difficult emotions. A researcher may ask oneself, “Have I done enough through my research? What does my role as a researcher entail? Was I prepared to face what emerged?”

Some attendees emphasized that emotional reactions were not barriers to research but were often important analytical tools. However, this notion of emotions as part of research methodology or a key methodological aid that could guide their analysis process was often concluded in the finalizing stage of research. Ethnographers are often well-equipped to reflect the role of emotions in the production of knowledge and the researcher's body in fieldwork (e.g., Holland, 2007; Hordge-Freeman, 2018; Schmidt et al., 2023). Nonetheless, research on sensitive topics covers a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches in which the researcher's positionality and emotions are not prepared to be reflected—until the researcher is about to conclude the project and feels the need to process the emotional work involved in conducting the study.

“All good?” Building supportive and collegial research communities

One observation shared among the workshop participants was that support from colleagues working on similar topics had been important and enabled the processing of emotions related to research. Equally, there was consensus that academia lacked the space for reflecting and addressing these issues and that they were rarely considered when planning research projects (see also, e.g., Fenge et al., 2019). For example, supervision is not typically part of research projects, nor is debriefing structurally integrated into interview processes. Many participants had experience in discussing interviews with a trusted colleague afterward, but not everyone had access to such support.

This lack of institutional support is particularly troublesome because the absence of structures for processing emotionally demanding experiences may inadvertently convey the message that the topic is not regarded as significant in academia or that researchers are expected to manage such burdens independently. Another challenge is that when the emotional dimensions of sensitive research are not acknowledged, researchers’ own emotions may become tacitly treated as “unscientific” or “inappropriate,” thereby tabooing researchers’ emotional responses. As a result, experiencing difficult emotions can feel like crossing unspoken boundaries or “breaking rules” that were never made explicit (Barlow and Hall, 2007; for similar challenges in social services, see Piippo et al., 2021).

The workshop participants considered it vital for their well-being to have a collegial space to process their emotions, rather than merely trying to cope with these. According to them, reflecting on emotional engagement in the research process is a skill that can be developed. Moreover, after an emotionally rewarding research process, many felt they needed collegial interaction to make sense of, conceptualize, and theorize what had occurred, framing knowledge production as a collective endeavor. Approaching their data analytically was generally considered “therapeutic” in itself.

Finally, it is also crucial that researchers are supported when they face public hostility or targeted criticism on social media. In the absence of appropriate support, experiences of public belittling or invalidation may prompt researchers to question whether the personal and professional risks of such work are bearable or justified. At a broader level, this dynamic risks raising the threshold for undertaking socially important but politically sensitive research.

Conclusion

The reflections in this Note highlight how emotional engagement is embedded in every stage of the research process. Yet researchers often work in institutional environments that fail to recognize or support this engagement. While formal ethics processes focus on participant protection, researcher well-being remains marginal. We recommend that institutions take researcher well-being more seriously by integrating structured debriefing, supervision, and peer reflection into qualitative research training and research project planning, thereby creating supportive structures that extend across career stages. Such practices would help normalize the emotional dimensions of research, enhance researcher preparedness (for lack of readiness, see Fenge et al., 2019), and strengthen the conditions under which sensitive and socially essential inquiry can be conducted.

Recognizing researcher emotion is an ethical imperative that can increase reflexivity, sharpen analysis, and improve the quality and sustainability of research itself. By opening a space for reflection, conversation, and care, we may move toward a more humane and responsible practice of qualitative inquiry.