Safeguarding yourself and your team

In this video, user researchers discuss the importance of safeguarding yourself and your team during research.

Research can be challenging. We sometimes have to research distressing or sensitive topics, share challenging findings, and deal with participants who express hurtful or discriminatory views. For this reason, it is essential that we plan research and ensure that we and the rest of our team are looked after.

As user researchers, our role is heavily focused on understanding the personal experiences of users, empathising with them, and being able to communicate this to teams and stakeholders. 

Research might explicitly cover distressing or emotionally sensitive topics, but it’s important to remember that unexpected things can always come up in research, even if you’re researching a topic that you do not expect to cause distress.

Effects on researchers

When researching sensitive topics, the risk of aggressive or discriminatory behaviour can be heightened. It’s also important to be aware that there are instances where participants can behave in a discriminatory way towards researchers or observers, or express discriminatory views. This does not have to be directly targeted at any individual in the research session to have a harmful effect.

Some researchers experience conditions known as vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.

Vicarious trauma is a negative reaction to experiencing the trauma of other people that has a detrimental effect on the researcher.

Compassion fatigue results from working with people who are deeply in need, which causes constant emotional and mental distress to the researcher, with negative effects on their capacity for compassion and empathy.

In government, we work with all sorts of people who are in all sorts of situations.

Even if you think your research will not bring up distressing topics, you may be surprised about what comes up. This is why it is so important for all researchers to be aware of these risks and how best to deal with them.

Taking steps to protect yourself

Your research plan should detail what steps you will take to protect yourself, your team, and your participants, even if you are not directly researching distressing or emotionally sensitive topics.

A good starting point can be to work with your team to discuss potential difficulties for yourself, your participants and team members before writing your research plan, so that you can include any potential mitigations.

Ways of safeguarding yourself and your team include:

• limiting the number of research sessions each day to allow time for breaks
• reading difficult subject matter at the same time as a team member (‘pair reading’), so that you can discuss anything difficult you have read
• briefing all team members so they understand the format and subject matter of the planned research sessions
• planning debrief sessions with team members to talk about the impact of the research
• always ensuring you conduct in-person research with at least one other person present

You could also consider establishing distress protocols for yourself, your team, and your participants. A distress protocol sets out steps that you will take to end the session quickly and safely if you, a team member, or a participant becomes distressed during research.

It’s a good idea to communicate and circulate any distress protocols to your team before you go into research, especially if any of them are observing or note taking. This ensures that they will also feel safe and prepared, as well as understand and be able to anticipate the circumstances in which a researcher may need to end a research session.

Task

Even if you are not a researcher or have not experienced the things we have discussed in the previous steps, we all experience stress at work!

In the comments below, share your top tips to destress, relax and unwind after a long or difficult day. We can all benefit from more relaxation!