Looking after yourself when you are researching problems
Being a user researcher at Scope
As user researchers at Scope a big part of our job is to understand the problems disabled people are having.
For three years I have been listening to people’s battles with unequal and discriminatory services, systems and attitudes. Now given the cost of living, disabled people have even more limited options.
Our energy team helps people save money on their bills. They have told us that they are now more of a reassurance service. Telling people that yes, they have done all they can to reduce their bills. And no, there is nothing more they should be doing. The options they could give people before, for example switching tariffs, don’t exist.
Listening to people in crisis knowing there is nothing they can do, or we can advise weighs heavy.
Problems are real, inequality is systemic, and people are dealing with a lot. But I am trying to remember that no one person is having all these problems at once. If we can focus on one participant and their situation at a time, we can listen to them and honour their story better.
When it comes to wellbeing, what works for some may not work for others. Here I share how I try to balance feelings of disillusionment that come with user research in the context of poverty and inequality.
Using boundaries in my empathy
We attended empathy fatigue training run by consultant Alice Hanscomb. This gave me a new perspective on empathy as a muscle. You need to use it properly to make it stronger.
Using it properly means keeping a boundary between our emotions and the participants’. It is not about being detached or aloof. It is making sure our focus is on them, not us. We listen to understand the participant, without trying to imagine how we might feel. This means our personal emotions are less involved in the session, and there is less potential for vicarious trauma.
As qualitative researchers we are used to focusing on the participant. We practice reflexivity to think about how our own perceptions might influence our interpretation of data. It’s the first time I have thought hard about keeping my emotions to one side as well as my biases.
Qualitative researchers care about people. But we need to show care without drawing on our emotions or trying to relate. Instead, we listen, ask questions, acknowledge, and reflect what the participant has shared to show we want to understand.
Using boundaries between each participant
Another thing I’ve realised is that I need boundaries between participants.
We speak to many people in hard situations. My brain tends to collect all the problems that my individual participants are facing into one big pile.
It’s understandable because that’s our job. To gather individual stories, pull out “pain points”, synthesise them and communicate them as insights which are useful to designers. It is easy to let one person’s problem build on another.
Once I have communicated the collective problem, I think about the individuals again. This reminds me that problems are more manageable when people are dealing with fewer of them at once.
Participants’ lives are much bigger than the problems we help them solve. Maybe they had a cat, maybe we laughed because neither of us could work out how the DWP calculate savings as income (it’s a low bar for humour), maybe they were going to buy a tart tatin pan with their research incentive (true story).
Balance the bleak
This is a phrase I use a lot recently. It works for me because there are no silver linings, and nothing that can be done short of a revolution. So rather than trying to reframe the bad situations, we can intentionally expose ourselves to positive stories.
For me it is helpful to seek out examples of humans succeeding in fighting for what’s theirs. Stories from completely different contexts can bring some perspective too. After a day of hearing about participants fight for their PIP, I came across this podcast episode about Nemonte Nenquimo defending ancestral territory in the Amazon rainforest. It balanced the bleak.
See the value in the short term
Scope’s campaign team talked to us about some breakthroughs that our campaigns have had. Our campaigns and mobilisation manager Jess told us about their work. I admired how relentless she is, playing the long game, changing public policy one piece at a time.
Jess emphasized that policy change is not the only thing that’s important. The campaign is a chance for disabled people and their families to get together and have their voices heard by shaping campaign messaging and events.
Our work is similar. We can’t solve people’s problems, but we can provide a space for people to talk and be listened to. Participants often tell us how good it has been to share and that they appreciate the opportunity to improve content that will help others in their situation.
We still aim for tangible social and policy change. But it helps to recognise the benefits of what we do in the short term.
Asking the research community
Jack recently asked twitter for some tips on supporting user researchers dealing with traumatic things. There are lots of great tips and signposts in the thread.
Some of the most important practical things include:
- Understand your own limits, know when you are feeling emotionally run down.
- Recognise which topics may trigger your emotions, it is OK not to do research sessions on those topics. Managers, check in on which topics your line reports are comfortable working on.
- Manage your workload so that you have time between sessions, debriefs with colleagues can be useful.
- Do not run sessions alone.
We make sure participants’ wellbeing is protected in our research too. We have revised our participant wellbeing policy to build on the ethics and safeguarding procedures we follow. We will write about that next.
What do you do?
Please let me know if anything resonates, and if you have any tips that work for you and your team.
