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

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.