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

Emotional Labor in Dementia Research

The concept of emotional labor refers to the regulation and management of emotions within the workplace. This labor may involve a dissonance between the emotions that are internally felt and the emotions that can be externally expressed. The concept of emotional labor can be applied to the emotional management that occurs during research often when directly interacting with research participants. These emotions can have a positive role in building rapport and enabling the researcher to understand the participant's world. But equally, it can lead to emotional strain and potentially have a negative impact on researcher well-being. In this paper, we apply the concept of emotional labor to dementia research. While there has been attention paid to ethical issues in dementia research, this has often focused on the impact on the participant and not the researcher. Within this paper, we first draw on the literature to provide an overview of the role of emotional labor in the research context. Within the literature, we identify nine research scenarios where emotional labor might occur within dementia research. We then present three case studies illuminating our experiences of emotional labor within dementia research. These case studies provide illustrative examples of some of the research scenarios identified in the literature. To synthesize the learning from the literature and our case studies, we propose peer-critiqued recommendations for managing emotional labor in dementia research. We conclude by considering the implications for other health researchers.

Researching Alcohol Consumption During Pregnancy. Opportunities and Challenges With Two Methods of Data Acquisition

Qualitative research methods, primarily interviews, have become more common in the field of addiction research. Other data sources were often neglected, although sources such as social media can offer insights into the realities of people, since social media also plays a relevant role in today's living environments. This article examines the use of online forums as an underutilized data source in contrast to telephone interviews, to identify methodological opportunities and challenges. We analyzed nine discussion threads and seven interviews about 'alcohol consumption during pregnancy'. Discursive comparison of the results was performed with a focus on sampling issues, comparability and risks for participants and researchers. Key issues were present in both data sources. People with different opinions were openly hostile in forums, while tolerance was more often expressed in interviews. The interviews showed a rather mild communication style, which could be attributed to social desirability. In the forum discussions, the participants often expressed themselves very directly. To comprehensively grasp the subject matter of the research, it is important to recognize the types of communication promoted by different data sources. These results have implications for research about female substance use. Knowledge of the issues will bestow a valuable contribution to researchers working in the field of substance use to help develop appropriate research approaches, as they engage in research into this highly stigmatized and controversial area.

Women Caring for Husbands Living with Parkinson’s Disease: A Phenomenological Study Protocol

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an emerging pandemic caused by aging, longevity, and industrialization. Most people diagnosed with PD initially experience mild symptoms, but over time the symptoms become debilitating. Given their intensive care requirement, most married people living with PD receive care from their spouses; most are female caregivers. Because caregiving is hard work with long hours, caregivers experience stress, fatigue, and depression, often leading to exhaustion and burnout. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study is to understand the lived experience of women caregivers of husbands living with PD. As part of this study protocol, women caring at home for their husbands diagnosed with PD will be purposely recruited from the Colorado Parkinson Foundation. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted by Zoom© until data saturation is achieved. Colaizzi’s seven-step process will be used to analyze the data in Atlas.ti. Strategies have been incorporated into the study protocol to maximize trustworthiness and to insure methodological rigor. The study will be reported using recommendations from the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research and the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research. Findings from this study may guide intervention development to improve the caregiving experience and to inform clinical practice guidelines for health care professionals.

The Problems with Care: A Feminist Care Scholar Retrospective

Seeking to support qualitative researchers in the artful development of feminist care scholarship, our goal here is to ‘look back’ on how we have conceptualized the problems of care and developed research that illuminates the social organization of care in distinct ways. As part of a ‘feminist care scholar retrospective’, we present five condensed ‘reverse research proposals’, which are retrospective accounts of past research or scholarly activity. From there, we discuss how each project begins with a particular problematic for investigation and a particular conception of care (e.g., as practices, as work, as a concept) to illuminate facets of the social organization of care shaping paid and unpaid care work and its interpretations. These approaches reveal multiple and overlapping ways that care is embodied, understood and organized, as well as ways care can be transformed.

Immersion, drowning, dispersion and resurfacing: Coping with the emotions of ethnographic management learning

While organisational researchers have had a long-standing commitment to ensuring the well-being of others, relatively little attention has been paid to the care of fieldworkers themselves, particularly in emotional terms. Drawing on personal experiences of ethnographic research with UK charity Samaritans, this paper considers the ways in which embedding oneself in the culture of another organisation can expose researchers to pain which, if not recognised or ameliorated, can be become toxic. The paper questions whether such pain is an inevitable consequence of certain forms of qualitative research and, if so, how we might learn to cope with its effects. In answer, the paper describes a journey through immersion, drowning and eventually resurfacing, where the latter is facilitated by a process defined as emotional dispersion. The paper contributes to our understanding of (i) the necessarily painful nature of certain immersive modes of ethnographic and qualitative research, (ii) the conceptualisation of emotional dispersion and its practical implications for coping with emotional pain, burnout and toxicity as a relational practice and (iii) the relative balance of institutional and individual duties when it comes to a care of the self in emotional terms.