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The purpose of this paper is to offer practical researcher self-care strategies to prepare for and manage the emotions involved in doing organizational ethnographic research. Institutional ethics policies or research training programs may not provide guidance, yet emotions are an integral part of research, particularly for ethnographers immersed in the field or those working with sensitive topics or vulnerable or marginalized people.

The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork over nine months with a voluntary organization in the UK, Yarl’s Wood Befrienders, to explore the experiences and activities of volunteer visitors who offer emotional support to women detained indefinitely in an immigration removal center. The author is a “complete member researcher,” or “at-home ethnographer,” a volunteer visitor and a former detainee.

The author describes the emotional impact the research personally had on her and shares learning from overcoming “compassion fatigue.” Self-care strategies based on the literature are recommended, such as a researcher self-assessment, identification of the emotional risks of the research, and self-care plan formulated during project planning. Suggested resources and activities to support the well-being of researchers are explored.

This paper provides practical resources for researchers to prepare for and cope with emotional and mental health risks throughout the research process. It builds awareness of safeguarding researchers and supporting them with handling emotional disruptions. Without adequate support, they may be psychologically harmed and lose the potential to critically engage with emotions as data.

The literature on emotions in doing research rarely discusses self-care strategies. This paper offers an actionable plan for researchers to instil emotional and mental well-being into the research design to navigate emotional challenges in the field and build resilience.

Self-care is defined as the ability to take care of one’s body and health with or without the help of healthcare personnel. The purpose of this paper is to explore the opportunities for self-care among imprisoned women within the constraints of a confined life, which, in turn, affect their health.

Primary data have been collected through semi-structured interviews with 90 women in three prisons in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Findings reveal that a majority of the women cited the inability to self-care was due to factors such as constricted architecture, specific penal policies that thwarted relational contexts in prisons and also the loss of control over their consumptive choices. However, it was found that coping mechanisms also existed among some women who actively constituted penal spaces for self-care. Many long-term imprisoned women tried to actively engage themselves in daily activities such as the “labour” allotted to them.

The paper concludes that abilities to self-care have a deep impact on the health of women, which if not facilitated will lead to a health depleting experience. At a time when Indian prisons are focussing on rehabilitation, the recommendations for providing opportunities for self-care in prisons can minimize the “pains” of imprisonment and pave the way for rehabilitation.

The research is based on data collected during original fieldwork conducted in three prisons in West Bengal, India. It provides valuable insights on how penal environments affect self-care opportunities of imprisoned women.

This study centers the reflections of principals across the USA as they navigated the overwhelming stress of closing and reopening schools during a global pandemic. Specifically, the authors explored how school principals addressed self-care and their own well-being during the pandemic.

This research study is part of a broader qualitative study conducted by 20 scholars from across the USA in Spring 2020 and organized by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). This national research team conducted 120 qualitative interviews with public school principals in 19 different states and 100 districts. As part of this team, the authors coded and analyzed all 120 transcripts in NVivo using a self-care framework.

The responses from the participants capture some of the complexity of self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found evidence of both negative and positive sentiments towards self-care that will be described in five major themes. For the tensions with self-care, the authors developed two primary themes: leaders eat last and keep from falling off the cliff. For the demonstrations of self-care, the authors also developed three primary themes: release the endorphins, people need people and unplug from work.

Although researchers have identified the stressors and reactions of principals during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known on how principals engaged in self-care practices. This study aims to identify these self-care practices and offer recommendations for principals.

Concerns about psychological well-being (PWB) in doctoral students have grown in recent years. The purpose of this study was to explore qualitatively doctoral students’ perceptions of factors that promoted their PWB during the doctoral journey.

Nine recent doctoral graduates at an English university participated in the study. Participants recalled their experience and PWB during the doctoral journey via a life grid and semi-structured interview. The life grids were visually inspected to identify high points in PWB whilst the interview data were analysed thematically.

The analysis produced the following seven themes representing factors that participants described during periods of better PWB: accomplishments; intrinsic rewards; self-efficacy; comprehension and understanding; supervisor support; wider support network; and self-care and lifestyle.

By adopting a positive psychology approach and exploring qualitatively factors that promoted PWB in doctoral students, this study offers an alternative perspective to research on doctoral student well-being, which has largely adopted a pathological focus. As such, the study demonstrates the utility of approaching research on doctoral students’ PWB from a positive psychology perspective. Findings are discussed in relation to the extant literature, and future directions for research are outlined.

Purpose – This chapter explores the strategies and tactics employed by researchers when dealing with emotionally challenging situations, both in the field and in academia in general.

Methodology/Approach – It draws on a qualitative longitudinal project investigating how recent Polish migrants from cities that are rather homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion make sense of, and come to terms with, the much greater diversity they encounter in German and British cities. The project adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes social network analysis, focus groups, creative methods and in-depth interviews.

Findings – Moving beyond the inside–outsider binary in qualitative research, the authors reflect on their management of conflicting feelings about what happens in research situations. The authors discuss interview situations they found particularly emotionally challenging and the different ways they supported each other during and after fieldwork, for instance, when faced with situations in which research participants say things that are racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, classist or misogynist. They reflect on their use of electronic media, especially email and messenger applications, as tools which not only allow them to unpack the emotions that emerge in fieldwork, but also enable them to collaboratively reflect on their own positionalities in the field.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that face-to-face and virtual interactions with colleagues can create spaces of care, self-care and solidarity. These relational spaces can form integral support systems for researchers and help them to deal with both the emotionality of social-science research and the wider emotional labour of academic work.

This paper offers key methodological insights for scholars new to qualitative transformative service research (TSR).

The paper offers ten lessons on conducting qualitative TSR that the authors have gleaned, across more than 30 years (combined) of qualitative inquiries and engagement with other scholars conducting and publishing what may be now termed TSR.

The key lessons of conducting qualitative TSR work include: displaying ethics in conducting and presenting qualitative TSR; preparing for and understanding the research context; considering design, mechanics and technical elements; being participant-centric; co-creating meaning with participants; seeking/using diverse types of data; analyzing data in an iterative fashion, including/respecting multiple perspectives; presenting evidence in innovative ways; and looking inward at every stage of the research process.

The paper provides implications for addressing the vulnerability of both research participants and researchers with the aim of improving research methods that lead to improved service research and well-being outcomes.

Clearly, the complexity and importance of the social problems TSR scholars investigate – poverty, war, disaster recovery, inadequate healthcare – requires preparation for how to engage in transformative service research. Importantly, the paper fits with recent persistent calls within the broader literature of services marketing to: use service research and design to create “uplifting changes” within society and broaden the paradigmatic underpinnings of service research to include dynamic, process-oriented approaches, which capture the dynamic and relational aspects of service ecosystems.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon how encountering trauma unexpectedly in the field informs the doing of fieldwork.

A reflexive essay approach was adopted to explore traumatic incidents in extreme contexts. Written vignettes, interviews, field notes and information conversations served as the bases for reflections.

Four themes arose from the reflections (Bracketing, Institutional Pressure, Impact on Research and Unresolvedness). It was suggested that researchers engaged in extreme context research, and management and organization studies scholars engaged in dangerous fieldwork more broadly, are under institutional pressure to continue work that may put themselves in harm's way. Traumatic experiences also shape and reflect the researcher's identity, which informs choices about current and future research projects.

It was suggested that scholars will benefit from reading the accounts of others to reduce the burden of isolation that can accompany traumatic field experiences.

Exploring single traumatic events enabled in engaging with trauma encountered unexpectedly and directly in the field. The reflections reveal the effects of psychological and physical trauma on researchers, and highlight how trauma impacts the research process.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an accessible and interdisciplinary research strategy in organisational ethnography, called action ethnography, that acknowledges key concepts from action research and engaged and immersive ethnography. It aims to encourage methodological innovation and an impact turn in ethnographic practice.

A working definition of “action ethnography” is provided first. Then, to illustrate how an action ethnography can be designed by considering impact from the outset, the author draws on a study she is undertaking with a grassroots human rights monitoring group, based in England, and then discusses advantages and limitations to the approach.

The author suggests three main tenets to action ethnography that embrace synergies between action research and ethnography: researcher immersion, intervention leading to change and knowledge contributions that are useful to both practitioners and researchers.

This paper provides researchers who align with aspects of both action research and ethnography with an accessible research strategy to employ, and a better understanding of the interplay between the two approaches when justifying their research designs. It also offers an example of designing an action ethnography in practice.

Whereas “traditional” ethnography has emphasised a contribution to theoretical knowledge, less attention has been on a contribution to practice and to those who ethnographers engage with in the field. Action ethnography challenges researchers to consider the impact of their research from the outset during the research design, rather upon reflection after a study is completed.

In this chapter, I analyze how the intersection of geographic and social locations shapes ethnographic relationships in urban areas. While early urban ethnographers were acutely aware of the importance of geographic location, I argue that researchers’ social locations were ignored, obscuring how their bodies and social identities lead to different forms of knowledge about the metropolis. I use data from a two-year ethnographic research project conducted in Caracas, Venezuela as well as interviews conducted with women qualitative researchers to consider gendered dynamics of fieldwork experiences and data collection. Using a framework of embodied ethnography, which posits that all ethnographic knowledge is shaped by researchers’ bodies, I argue that men and women confront similar but distinct challenges while conducting fieldwork, and discuss what this means for data collection in cities. Specifically, I focus on how social control mechanisms, the gendered meanings attached to researchers’ bodies, and geographic barriers in urban areas can facilitate and restrict fieldwork. Critiquing hegemonic standards within ethnography that encourage researchers to leave their bodies out of their tales of the field, I advocate for the incorporation of gendered research experiences in our ethnographic writing with the aim of producing more complete narratives, but also to better prepare future ethnographers for fieldwork.

As online education proliferates, little attention has been given to understanding non-cognitive success factors, such as wellness, in online graduate student success. To begin to address this gap in understanding, this paper aims to explore the experiences of doctoral student wellness within the context of online distance education. Doctoral students, and their instructor, in an advanced qualitative research course sought to use collective autoethnography to address the following questions: How do the authors perceive the wellness as doctoral students engaged in distance education, and how do the authors understand the influence of the doctoral program cultures on the perceptions of the own wellness?

This paper emerged from a 12 week advanced qualitative research course where students opted to engage in a poetic arts-based collective autoethnography to reflect on and analyze their experience of wellness as doctoral students taking online courses. Data collection included the use of reflective journaling, creation of “My Wellness Is” poetry, and weekly group debriefing. Journals and poems were analyzed individually, then collectively. First and second cycle coding techniques were used, with the first cycle including process and descriptive coding and second round coding involving pattern coding.

Through first and second round coding, three primary themes emerged: positionality as an element of wellness, the role of community in maintaining wellness and awareness and action regarding wellness.

Due to the inherent nature of qualitative research, and specifically autoethnographic methods, the findings of this study may be difficult to generalize to the broader online graduate student population. Future research on this topic may use the experiences explored in this study as a basis for the development of future quantitative studies to measure the extent of these findings in the broader population.

This paper includes implications for the development of interventions that may support wellness in graduate students in online environments including support interventions from faculty advisors, leveraging academic curriculum to promote wellness, and suggestions for building community among online graduate students.

As technology advances, online education is quickly becoming a leading mechanism for obtaining a graduate education. Scholarship in this discipline has primarily focused on academic outcomes of online students and has largely focused on undergraduate populations. This paper broadens the conversation about online education by illustrating a non-cognitive dimension of the student experience, i.e. wellness, through the perspective of graduate students.

This paper addresses a gap in the current understanding of online graduate student experiences and outcomes using methods that provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced experience of online doctoral students.