Researcher wellbeing in dissemination and beyond

When we talk about researcher wellbeing (RWB) in SEC research, we frame it as something to proactively plan for and monitor as the work progresses. Throughout my PhD on sibling sexual abuse disclosure, I was supported by my supervisors to proactively plan for my wellbeing with supervision, informal training sessions, debriefs, boundaries, peer support and clinical supervision.

As I moved from PhD to Early Career Researcher, these strategies became embedded rituals in my research practice. While I would love to say I keep them up faithfully, the honest answer is I practise or revisit these most days, not all! But for others who have finished one SEC project and moved on to another, whether sensitive or not, the support built around that specific content may simply fall away once the project closes.

The long tail of SEC research

Perhaps the supervision tails off, the debriefs stop, and the small rituals that held you steady might gradually disappear because, on paper, the hardest part is behind you. However, compassion fatigue – described by Figley (1995) as the cost of caring; the cumulative emotional toll of repeated empathic engagement with the suffering of others – may not be, and compassion fatigue does not keep to our timeline. In my experience, that emotional weight does not simply leave when the fieldwork ends: it settles in quietly, often without our noticing, and waits until something brings that content back to the surface.

For some of us, this may resurface during dissemination of the SEC work, even though we tend to think of sharing our research as the safe part, the part that comes ‘after’, or the reward for the difficult work already done.

In reality, dissemination often puts us back in front of the very material we thought we had processed, and it tends to do so long after we have stopped actively practising those wellbeing strategies. The conference, the presentation, the panel, the revisions on the journal article you submitted months ago, these are the moments when the impact of the content may resurface, revealing that it never actually left.

Revoicing sensitive material

Personally, I have struggled with presenting and reading my participant quotes aloud. In those moments, I hear again the catches in participants’ throats as they shared the most difficult stories of their lives, and I can still see them holding back tears through our interviews. I am also aware of how the words might land for the audience, some of whom may have lived experience of the very topic I am presenting.

The emotional labour of making sure I do justice to my survivor and victim participants, and staying after a presentation to have conversations where unanticipated disclosures may be shared, can take a toll too. This often happens months after the analysis ended, and we may meet those moments without the scaffolding we once had around us. The emotion of the data finds us again, and in finding us, it shows us how much we have been carrying all along.

Forewarned is forearmed

Hearing others speak at conferences can also be emotionally challenging. We rarely arrive as neutral listeners: we bring with us the impacts of our own work. Often, the content we encounter speaks directly to that. So, when difficult content is presented unannounced, it lands not on a blank slate, but often on someone already carrying a great deal.

It is important here to be very clear that this is not a call for sensitive and distressing content to be softened or hidden away: as we know, ignorance is not bliss. These hard and unflinching presentations are necessary, and the work matters precisely because it refuses to look away. But necessary is not the same as unannounced.

For example, when I’m presenting, I like to give an honest account of what is coming, including how explicit the accounts are and the moments most likely to land hard. That specificity is what allows each of us, as an audience, to make an informed choice about whether to be in the room.

The requirement to revisit

When journal revisions come back with reviewer comments, often months have passed since I last sat with the content. I open the comments expecting a technical task, but then I find I am back inside the interview, re-reading the exact words someone used to describe the worst thing that ever happened to them, because a reviewer has asked me to say more about that very quote.

There is something strange about being asked to look more closely and precisely at pain in the name of rigour, especially when I had subconsciously convinced myself that part of the work was finished. The request itself is, of course, a necessary part of the process, and it very often improves the work, but it does not come with the acknowledgement that going back into the data might cost me something.

While I still have many of the strategies I built during my PhD in place, supervision I can draw on, and people I can debrief with, the return to the data still lands. Others, in making the change or redrafting the passage, may find themselves quietly sitting with the material again with no scheduled debrief or space to register how it landed, just a deadline and a track-changed document.

A call for expansion

So perhaps the real task is to widen how we think about RWB altogether. While I have certainly noticed the tide beginning to shift (though perhaps that is because I am so embedded in this work), there is still so much to be done in raising awareness, changing culture, and embedding proactive, dynamic, wrap-around support, throughout the lifecycle of a project and well beyond it.

Sometimes consideration for RWB tapers off at exactly the point the work goes out into the world, and this may be when the impacts find us again. Our wellbeing strategies should not end when the analysis does: they need to follow the researcher and the work all the way through dissemination, into the conference and onto the panel, and to recognise that the people sharing this research, and many of those listening to it, are often carrying far more than just words on a slide. A little more transparency about what is coming, and a little more grace for what it asks of us, would be helpful.

My hope is that this opens up more conversations about RWB in the dissemination phase, a part of the journey we rarely consider in this context, and about what might genuinely help in practice. That could mean: access to support that does not taper the moment a project closes; presentation content notes that are specific and transparent; and a shared understanding that those presenting, and those listening, may both be holding a great deal.

I do not have all the answers, and I do not pretend to, but naming these difficulties feels like a necessary first step, and I would love to hear how others have navigated this in their own work.

Dr Abbie Lake, Researcher Wellbeing Research Assistant, International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI)