Coping with Emotionally Challenging Research: Developing a Strategic Approach to Researcher Wellbeing

While previous work has highlighted the possible impacts of undertaking emotionally challenging research, it is only recently, particularly within the UK with the 2028 Research Excellence Framework focus on research culture, that this subject is starting to gain senior leadership attention. Funded by the UK Research and Innovation, Researcher England, Enhancing Research Culture fund. We undertook an in-depth study involving researchers across topics and disciplines in the humanities and social science, with the objectives of establishing: the impacts of studying emotionally challenging topics on researchers, what they currently found helpful in preventing and/or coping with these impacts, and what additional support they wanted. In this paper we report on findings related to the latter two objectives to provide insight into how future research projects could be ethically designed to minimize distress, secondary and vicarious trauma in researchers. We then use these findings to formulate an innovative strategic institutional response to researcher wellbeing and emotionally challenging studies that can be implemented in three stages: Bronze, which is focused on awareness raising and the development of policies and guidance that are built into ethical procedures; Silver, involving the establishment of training, clear referral pathways, and (funded) Researcher Wellbeing Plans - including regular academic supervision, team working, and extra time in workloads to undertake wellbeing interventions - built into the design of projects; and Gold, a wholistic institutional response where, in addition to the above, policies, processes, practices and culture are proactively attentive to the prevention of and provision for distress relating to emotionally challenging research.