Deakin University
Browse

Articulating researcher self-care, reflection and reflexivity: A note and practical guide for qualitative researchers to body map their research experience

journal contribution
posted on 2025-02-26, 04:13 authored by Louisa SmithLouisa Smith
While qualitative researchers on sensitive topics spend significant and important time assessing and mitigating risks for their research participants, there is much less focus on risks to researchers doing this work. Sensitive qualitative research requires researchers to empathise with participants talking about some of life's most challenging moments, and exposure to this can be deeply emotional and even traumatic for researchers. Researchers need a range of strategies to care for themselves throughout the research process. Currently, verbal and written strategies in line with researcher critical reflection and reflexivity are often advocated as key ways of mitigating the emotional impact of research. There is increasing evidence that arts-based approaches facilitate different kinds of reflections on emotional and embodied experiences. This paper describes how the arts-based method, body mapping, can be used by researchers to support researcher reflection on qualitative research. The process of creating, describing and reflecting on the embodied experience of doing the research through body mapping facilitated not only an engagement with the emotions elicited during the project but also illuminated absences and future actions. The paper provides clear guidelines for other researchers wishing to try the approach and also points to the need for institutional and structural responsibility for researcher health.

History

Journal

Qualitative Research

Pagination

1-12

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

1468-7941

eISSN

1741-3109

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Usage metrics

    Research Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC