This article examines the impact of conducting narrative research focusing on trauma and healing. It is told through three voices: the study participants who experienced the trauma, the researcher who shared her personal experiences conducting this research, and an academic colleague who acted as a reflective echo making sense of and normalizing the researcher's experience. Issues explored in the article include: harmonic resonance between the story of the participant and the life experiences of the researcher, emotional reflexivity, complex researcher roles and identities, acts of reciprocity that redress the balance of power in the research relationship, the need for compassion for the participants, and self-care for the researcher when researching trauma. The authors conclude that when researching trauma, the researcher is a member of a scholarly community and a human community, and that maintaining the stance as a member of the human community is an essential element of conducting trauma research.
In many institutions, the institutional review board/research ethics board (IRB/REB) uses the traditional audit approach that emerged from the biomedical community (e.g., Nuremburg Code, Belmont Report) to review the ethical acceptability of research using humans as participants. This approach is guided by participant protection and risk management concerns. This article discusses the approach to ethics review currently being adopted at a large Canadian university in transition from a teaching to a research institution. It articulates the values that guide the REB in its deliberations and explores how these values support a facilitative—rather than an audit—approach to ethics review. Two case studies of innovative qualitative inquiry are discussed to demonstrate how Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) has adopted an approach to ethics review that attempts to encourage, engage, and support qualitative researchers in their research initiatives, while respecting established legal and ethical guidelines targeted primarily at clinical research.
This paper describes the impact of extensive journalistic coverage on a small community in Quebec that experienced the murder of a teenage girl by a local man. Press coverage of the case was intense, as journalists converged on the small rural town to cover the story and the subsequent arrest of the suspect and his parents. In presenting the voices of both local residents and a journalist, this paper illuminates the secondary trauma and symbolic violence that can result from some forms of news coverage of a traumatic event. Five key themes regarding the impact of the media on community residents arose from the data: alienation from the community, anger at the media's public construction of the community, intrusion on community life, intrusion on the private processes of grief, and triggering renewed feelings of loss and grief. Implications for journalists are discussed, including being aware of the dynamics of symbolic violence and secondary trauma and incorporating positionality, empathy, and reflective practice into their reporting praxis.
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