Danger,Desire,and Disclosure: A Postqualitative Trauma-Informed Approach to the Ethics of Secrets and Emotion in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Qualitative research is full of spilled secrets, but what are the ethical implications of researchers/participants disclosing secrets in an interview? In this article, I explore the thicket of ethical issues surrounding disclosure and spilled secrets in qualitative research and propose a postqualitative model of trauma-informed research to navigate this thicket. I apply my unique model to five key ethical issues: (a) the significance of disclosure in interviews and the implications it has for the data collection and analysis process, (b) the catharsis participants can experience from spilling secrets and the risks this cathartic process can pose for the researcher, (c) how “insider” researchers can be adversely affected by participants sharing secrets, (d) the ethical issues that surround reciprocity and researchers sharing their own secrets, and (e) the role of silence and refusal in the interview and whether rapport-building and interviewing techniques can be considered a type of manipulation.

Introduction

A large portion of qualitative research is dedicated to exposing society’s “dirty secrets,” or the systems of violence and ostracization that disproportionately affect people of color, those who live with disability and/or mental illness, people who use drugs, and queer folk. As researchers, we are often sworn to keep participants’ identities secret and protect their data from unauthorized eyes. People who engage in illegal activities must be assured that their anonymity will be upheld and kept safe. This confidentiality protocol and the image of safety we routinely employ can lead participants to disclose their secrets in an interview.

Qualitative research is messy work. It explores the human condition and attempts to create an aperture into the lives of others so we may better understand the complexity of social reality. Interviews are one of the main ways this is done. But what are the limits to asking someone to share their reality with a stranger? What are the ethical implications of a participant disclosing information they have never told anyone else? There has been extensive discussion on the issue of disclosure and spilling secrets in qualitative research, but the true complexity surrounding this issue has not been given due consideration. To address this lacuna in the literature, I do two things in this article: (a) drawing from my own experiences and the literature, I demonstrate how the ethics of secrets is situated within a complicated thicket of ethical quandaries that involve power relations, manipulation, consent, emotion, and researcher–participant responsibility, and (b) propose a postqualitative model of trauma-informed research as a potential way to navigate this thicket.

A Postqualitative Approach to Trauma-Informed Research

What is Trauma-Informed Research?

Trauma-informed research is becoming an increasingly widespread methodology and is often heralded as the gold standard of care when engaging in sensitive research. It has been cited as an anti-colonial, anti-racist methodology (Alvarez & Farinde-Wu, 2022) and an embodied healing practice for those who have experienced systemic violence (Brigden, 2022). Trauma-informed research focuses on understanding how trauma manifests in the world and putting safety measures in place to prevent the perpetuation of trauma and support participants who have a history of trauma.

Sophie Isobel (2021) provides a comprehensive overview of what trauma-informed research might look like. She encourages researchers to assume that participants may have experiences of trauma, regardless of the topic. Participants should be provided with ample information about the study ahead of the interview so they can adequately prepare. Researchers should regularly check in with the participant throughout the interview to see how they are feeling, if they need anything, and/or would like to pause or stop. Isobel highlights the importance of being vigilant for signs of dissociation in the participant and communicating what the next section of the interview will entail before moving on. She also underscores the value of engaging in data sovereignty practices, such as reiterating to the participant their right to access their data and control how it is presented in publications. Trauma-informed research empowers participants to decide what stories they wish to share. It amplifies their voices and enables a more nuanced understanding of how systemic violence affects marginalized individuals (Lenette, 2019).

Trauma-informed research is a participant-facing methodology. That is, the researcher actions safety techniques for the participant’s benefit, often leaving the researcher somewhat neglected. There should be equal priority given to the well-being of the researcher as well as the participant. Some of these researcher safety practices might include attending trauma-informed debriefing sessions after interviews/ventures into the field or even temporarily stepping away from a project to engage in self-care. Researchers should set a maximum number of interviews each day/week to minimize the risk of vicarious trauma and emotional overload. When developing an interview schedule, “heavier” questions can be interspersed with “lighter” ones to make the interview more manageable for both the researcher and the participant. Researchers should feel empowered to assert boundaries in an interview if the participant steers the conversation into territories of trauma irrelevant to the interview topic.

What is Postqualitative Inquiry?

Postqualitative inquiry is an “antimethodology” (Nordstrom, 2018). It focuses on discarding normative modes of thinking around what is considered “scientifically valid” research and approaching the field in creative and improvisational ways. Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2018) urges qualitative researchers to resist the impulse to follow preexisting research methodologies that seek to identify the objective conditions in which a particular experience or phenomenon occurs. She instead suggests we forge our own methodologies that approach experience and social reality as a collection of forever-unfolding entanglements of forces that create unique forms of becoming (St. Pierre, 2017). The aim of postqualitative inquiry is to disrupt and de-normalize the organizing concepts and categories of existing methodologies. It is about throwing “into radical doubt the methodological project itself, especially its rage to methodologize” (St. Pierre, 2021b, p. 165).

St. Pierre describes her frustration with the rigidity of institutional methodologies and draws attention to the problematic underlying Cartesian onto-epistemologies within these methodologies. This Cartesian foundation employs a subject/object view of the world and assumes there is an external reality that can be objectively examined, measured, recorded, and categorized (St. Pierre, 2021a, 2023). St. Pierre goes further. She discusses how the belief that scientifically robust research can only be produced through strict adherence to dominant methodologies has endowed these methodologies with a “dogmatic” quality. This dogmatism leads researchers to stick to these methodologies without questioning the problematic core onto-epistemologies that lie within them (St. Pierre, 2021a).

From an ethics perspective, postqualitative inquiry holds a great deal of potential. An ethics of postqualitative inquiry encourages us to reconsider and reconfigure what ethical conduct might look like. It opens up a constantly shifting third way out for ethical dilemmas. Aaron M. Kuntz (2021) describes how postqualitative ethics are processual and “a means of engaging with the world that challenges the status quo to manifest difference—generating a series of relations that have yet to be” (p. 217).

Postqualitative inquiry is not without its risks. Pauliina Rautio (2021) highlights how postqualitative inquiry is a continuous balancing act between going methodologically rogue and having an established framework. One must be able to embrace the complicated entanglements of social reality while also being able to present data clearly and cogently. Indeed, St. Pierre’s (2019) definition of postqualitative inquiry can leave the reader feeling somewhat rudderless: “post qualitative inquiry never is. It has no substance, no essence, no existence, no presence, no stability, no structure” (p. 9, author’s emphasis). All research needs an established ethical framework to protect the researcher and participant, so encouraging the researcher to abandon all structure in favor of experimentation can allow for unethical conduct and harm to occur.

Intersections of Postqualitative Inquiry and Trauma-Informed Research

Postqualitative inquiry and trauma-informed research have a natural affinity. Both emphasize the need to be fluid and dynamic when engaging with participants and to allow emotion to be a guiding force. They embrace and celebrate the uncertainties and contradictions that arise from qualitative research. Postqualitative inquiry and trauma-informed research stress the need to preserve the humanity of research participants and not see them as mere fonts of data. These are also politically charged methodologies. Postqualitative inquiry shines a spotlight on the White, male-centric, heteronormative, positivist worldviews and values that underpin conventional methodologies. Engaging in this process of identification pushes the researcher into engaging in styles of research that challenge the problematic values that come with these ubiquitous worldviews (Stewart et al., 2021). Not only this, but researchers who engage in postqualitative inquiry should be “ability traitors” who recognize their own privileges and use their positions of power to fight the very systems of marginalization they benefit from (Holbrook, 2010). Without this self-awareness of privilege and power, the free-form nature of postqualitative inquiry can lead the researcher to inadvertently perpetuate the systems they are attempting to rally against (Bhattacharya, 2021; Holbrook, 2010; Wolgemuth et al., 2022). Trauma-informed research is an anti-oppressive methodology that focuses on helping others heal from the wounds of systemic violence. Researchers can also use trauma-informed research as a tool to unlearn unconscious biases and uncover new ways of fighting systems of marginalization (Alessi & Kahn, 2023; Waterfall & Button, 2022).

These are both feminist methodologies too. Feminist research focuses on critically examining structural and interpersonal power relations. The aim is to expose and dismantle the machinations of social oppression in order to liberate those who are adversely affected by these systems. This style of research seeks to empower those who live on the margins and develop community through care and rebellion against structures of violence. Postqualitative inquiry ticks all of these boxes. Trauma-informed research has a distinct feminist history. The term “trauma-informed” emerged in the early 2000s and was first used in the context of developing of more effective and empathetic health care service delivery (Harris & Fallot, 2001); however, the underlying paradigm was a product of the radical feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical feminists resisted the idea that trauma was an individual pathology and instead saw it as a product of the systems of silencing, exclusion, and marginalization that uniquely and disproportionately affect women (Herman, 1992). The shelters and crisis services created during this period for women experiencing domestic violence and victim-survivors of sexual violence were all built on this new understanding of trauma (Marecek, 1999). So, while the term “trauma-informed” may not have been used, these women were engaging in the model of trauma-informed care employed today.

Postqualitative Trauma-Informed Research

What would it look like if we brought postqualitative inquiry and trauma-informed research together? My model of postqualitative trauma-informed research has eight components.

1. Using emotion and improvisation as guiding tools. Emotions are both a source of knowledge and a technology of safety. By listening to our feelings and connecting to the emotional states of others during an interview, we can sense when a boundary has been crossed, when to pull back, and when to gently probe further. Emotions inform us when a trauma response is beginning to rear and allow us to change tact.

2. Viewing interviews, interactions with participants, data, and the field as events of becoming which are constantly evolving. Qualitative research is a deeply embodied style of work. It changes us in unexpected ways; we are often a slightly different person when a project comes to a close. To say that data, the field, and interactions with participants are events of becoming is to draw attention to this iterative process of change. There are unique aspects to every interaction we have with the field, data, and participants, and being aware of this dynamism brings new insights into our larger understanding of the research.

3. Engaging in research methods that resist and revolt against structures of oppression. No research is politically neutral or personally unbiased, so it is important to be attuned to the hidden and explicit social influences surrounding a study. As academics and experts in our chosen fields of study, we hold unique forms of power that should be used to engage with these sociopolitical influences to create tangibly transformative research.

4. Using research as a practice of intimacy and community care. Stephanie Springgay (2021) describes how research-creation is a “practice of intimacy” characterized by trans-corporeal sensations and fluxes of affect and emotion. Viewing research-creation as a practice of intimacy emphasizes the tangled relationality of social reality and the responsibilities of care and justice we hold toward each other. Trauma-informed research is centered on extending care to others and practicing self-care. By using research as a tool of radical resistance, it becomes a form of community care.

5. Seeing data as an ephemeral reality that lives in on the researcher, participant, and reader. A data set is a record of how space and place, feelings, bodies, sociocultural dynamics, materiality, and constructions of reality coalesce at a point in time. This record has an enduring vitality that manifests in infinite ways. The researcher and participant hold onto the embodied experience of making that record, and it is re-lived during the data analysis and writing-up stages. Once it has been published, others take on this reality and transform it into something new.

6. Acknowledging that the researcher is affected in just as many ways as the participant in terms of safety, power, privilege, and vulnerability. Equity is a foundational tenet of ethical research, yet it is frequently discussed only in relation to the participant. There needs to be greater attention paid to the ways that research impacts those who are conducting it. Researchers need to be afforded more care from institutions in ways that do not curb research (i.e., offering additional support rather than blocking potentially transformative studies because of perceived risks). They should also feel empowered to integrate alternative styles of self-care into their research practice. For some, this might look like digesting difficult interviews through meditation, whereas for others, it might be a form of “wild self-care” that involves illicit drug use (see Clay & Treharne, 2022).

7. Using instances of confusion and the unexpected as sensitizing tools and pieces of data. Uncertainty abounds in qualitative research, and these instances of unsureness open interesting avenues of inquiry: what are we unsure about? Why do we feel uncertain? Does this uncertainty bring curiosity or concern? These questions in themselves are useful pieces of data.

8. Leaning into the tensions and uncertainties of qualitative research. Fraught and ambiguous situations should be explored as well as interrogated. While questioning points of uncertainty can bring unique insights, experimenting with these junctures can radically change a project. It moves the process from an intellectual exercise to an embodied experience that actively engages the field and participants.

The Ethical Thicket of Secrets in Qualitative Research

The Significance of Disclosure for Participants

“I’ve never told anyone that before.” In my time as a qualitative researcher, many of my interview participants have uttered this phrase. I have often wondered what to make of it. How should I respond? Is there a “right” response? In many instances, it is said with a sigh of catharsis. They felt comfortable disclosing a secret to a relatively neutral party knowing it would go no further. The researcher becomes a kind of emotional scapegoat for the participant to off-load and unpack complicated feelings and difficult experiences; they are someone to “bear witness” to the pain and trauma the participant endured (Campbell, 2002). Kathryn Becker-Blease and Jennifer Freyd argue that it can be counterproductive, and even harmful, to avoid asking the participant about traumatic or difficult experiences. Skirting around direct questions related to their experiences with child abuse or sexual violence, for example, can reify the stigma associated with these issues and further entrench societal silence. It can also be seen as a collaborative denial of what the participant experienced (Becker-Blease & Freyd, 2006).

The researcher can be placed in a difficult position when a participant discloses a secret. Knowing you are privy to a certain piece of information adds a great deal of weight to that information. It also raises some important questions. Why have they felt uncomfortable sharing this information with others? How long have they held onto this secret? Furthermore, spilled secrets can radically change the tone and meaning of an interview. Certain phrases carry a new significance; moments of discomfort or silence are now illuminated; the reason why the participant decided to share their story becomes slightly clearer.

Disclosure is not always pleasant or cathartic for participants. Within the qualitative research community, there is a general attitude that it is researchers, not participants, who are at greater risk of experiencing trauma from the interview process. This is perhaps the only instance where the researcher’s well-being is routinely prioritized over the participant’s. There is a substantial body of evidence that suggests the belief that participating in trauma research leads to significant trauma distress afterwards is unfounded (DePrince & Chu, 2008; Gagnon et al., 2015; Griffin et al., 2003; Jaffe et al., 2015). This research implies that engaging in trauma research is relatively innocuous and typically has a positive risk-benefit outcome for individuals. Steven J Collings (2019) problematizes this research which suggests that participants who live with trauma are more resilient than researchers who specialize in fields related to trauma. He discusses how research ethics panels (also known as institutional review boards) categorize research as either greater-than-low-risk (i.e., risky) or low-risk (i.e., no risk) and that this binary thinking has bled into the way researchers approach their work. He argues that research that focuses on trauma contains “a unique constellation of risk factors” for participants that emerge in dynamic ways depending upon the research topic and the participants’ mental health background. All of this is to say that participant re-traumatization is indeed a serious risk that must be attended to, and the apparent tendency among researchers to downplay this risk only heightens the need to implement appropriate safety measures.

Analyzing Secrets

Researchers are the arbiters of what data are worthy of inclusion in a publication. In the words of Janice Morse (2015), “all data are not equal.” We move through transcripts and break them down into core themes and ideas to create a distillation of novel findings that enhance our understanding of the world. In this way, certain parts of an interview become more valuable than others. Naomi Weiner-Levy and Ariela Popper-Giveon (2013) identify the seemingly irrelevant or omitted pieces of data as the “dark matter” of qualitative research. They argue this dark matter is not neutral but represents how the researcher has approached and interpreted the data: the voids and things left out speak just as loudly as the data that appear in final publications. Eva Pallesen (2023) makes a similar argument and says that meditating on the vague and half-glimpsed things that get relegated to the margins of notebooks and the back of the mind can be highly valuable pieces of data. Some researchers use methodologies that include the participant in the data analysis and writing-up process, such as participatory action research (McIntyre, 2008), interviewee transcript review (Hagens et al., 2009), and member checking (McGrath et al., 2019). This is intended to engender participants with greater agency over how they are represented in publications and reduce the power imbalance between researcher and participant, but they are far from common practice.

Being told by a participant that this piece of information is special has implications for the data analysis process. Social reality is co-constructed between the researcher and the participant during an interview (Josselson, 2013), and researchers have an ethical duty to try and represent the participant’s reality as clearly and honestly as possible. To deliberately exclude information the participant has highlighted as important can therefore be seen as a failure to meet this responsibility. However, what if the participant holds discriminatory values and uses stigmatizing language? George Dertadian (2020) and Nadia Bashir (2020) recount experiences in the field where they encountered participants who proudly identified as racist and supported violence against non-White groups. Dertadian and Bashir highlight their deep sense of discomfort while sitting in a room with these individuals who relished the idea of enacting hurt on marginalized people. The interviews with these participants proved to be of little value in terms of data but did instil a greater emotional resilience in the researchers and allowed them to navigate the field better.

I had a similar experience, albeit not to the same degree of intensity, with my participant Henry. ¹ Our interview focused on the ways managing a gay sauna had influenced his relationship with sex and the gay community. He held some personal-political values I found troubling. He spoke about how “oversized people” should be discouraged from being “comfortable with their bodies,” and that by undressing and exposing their fat bodies in the sauna, they were promoting an unhealthy way of living. He also mentioned that almost all gay men are “selfish,” oversexed “predators” who “want to be abused.” It was difficult hearing him talk about his clientele, fat people, and gay men in this way. By the end of the interview, I found it hard to empathize with his loneliness and struggle to connect with “good” gay men. His interview was helpful in further developing my study’s conceptual framework and allowed me to get a deeper understanding of the issues some people face within the community, but it remained difficult data to work with.

Researchers are charged with the responsibility of providing an accurate representation of participants without damaging their character, and dealing with explicitly racist or homophobic remarks complicates this process. This is not to say that researchers should sanitize the data by removing potentially controversial statements—quite the opposite. Presenting participants’ discriminatory attitudes in publications can spark social change because they can demonstrate the way stigma and systemic violence manifest in the world. When faced with these kinds of remarks, the researcher is forced into a balancing act. They must include some of these ostracizing statements without denigrating the participant while also keeping more extreme comments secret to protect the participant’s character (even though they should not be identifiable to others).

My postqualitative model of trauma-informed research invites the researcher to immerse themselves in the data and become affected by it. Feeling can be a methodological tool to understand the nature of experience more deeply. Being immersed in the data produces a type of becoming that opens unique avenues of data interpretion. We approach the data in slightly different ways each time we conduct analysis. We will have new ideas; we may feel exhausted at the prospect of deconstructing yet another transcript; the interview content will take on a different tone from one day to the next. Some scholars have discussed the dangers of working with difficult data because of its emotional charge. Louise Lambert (2019) highlights how the feeling body can spasm with emotion when analyzing heavy pieces of data. She suggests that conducting data analysis by “stay[ing] with the trouble” and “think[ing] through the body” can allow the researcher to tell participants’ stories in alternative and innovative ways.

Safety, Secrets, and Catharsis

People keep secrets hidden for a reason. This might be due to stigma or shame, or they may fear what might happen if the secret is set loose upon the world. It is standard procedure during the recruitment and consent process to ensure the participant knows their right to anonymity and confidentiality. These protective protocols help to assure the participant that the interview will be a “safe space” where they can say anything without fear of repercussion (unless it initiates mandatory action, such as disclosing the serious intent to harm themselves or others). The transformative potential of bringing someone into a secret space and telling them, “I want to hear your story” is not to be underestimated.

Anyone with interviewing experience will know the cathartic potential of interviews. The assurance of anonymity can increase the potency of catharsis for individuals from stigmatized groups as they are not often presented with the opportunity to talk openly and honestly about the issues they regularly face (Genz, 2010). One of the risks here is that participants may treat the interview as a therapy session and the researcher as an ersatz counselor. This phenomenon of participants approaching research interviews as therapy sessions potentially stems from researchers incorporating counseling skills and language into the trust- and rapport-building process to facilitate greater participant disclosure (Duncombe & Jessop, 2002/2005; Newton, 2017). Interviews tend to hold some therapeutic value for participants, so it is often unavoidable for the researcher to be considered an improvisational counselor. Our task here is to carefully tread between the roles of researcher, confidante, and therapist. We weave about through each of these roles but must always prioritize our researcher identity/position.

How might participants’ cathartic disclosures affect the researcher? Much has been written about the emotional labor and vicarious trauma (Howe, 2022) that can accompany research on difficult issues like grief (Rowling, 1999), suicide (Fincham et al., 2008), and sexual violence (Campbell, 2002). Too much of this work without adequate support and self-care can lead a researcher to burn out and emotional neuralgia (Rager, 2005). Reflecting on some ethnographic work she did in a cancer drop-in center, Jacqueline Watts (2008) speaks about how emotionally overwhelming the research became. She could feel her participants’ loneliness, and their rapidly deteriorating physical and emotional bodies made her confront the fragility of her own mortality. This introspection brought a sense of “emotional self-centeredness” weighed with guilt: she felt selfish for becoming mired in her own feelings and not channeling that energy into caring for her participants. However, she reframes this experience as a practice of empathy, and argues that taking on the anxieties and worries of a participant during an interview can be a technique of care. “Doing empathy” validates the hardship the participant is experiencing, allows the researcher to better understand the ordeal they are working through, and facilitates a more intimate sense of trust between the researcher and participant.

While not every interview will feel overwhelming or confronting, some secrets can leave you feeling helpless and unable to offer any meaningful support to the participant. I had such an experience with Sophia, a woman I was interviewing about her experiences with opioid-dependence treatment. The interview had gone over the hour; we had both lost track of time from being so engrossed in conversation. Sophia candidly spoke about her experiences with addiction, various attempts to “get clean” over the years, and the role her husband played in all this. Knowing that her identity was protected, she described how her husband had forced her into treatment under threat of divorce and financial hardship. She recounted the history of emotional manipulation within the relationship and the kinds of coercive and controlling behaviors he engaged in, like electronically tracking her movements. Their marriage was a volatile one. She had almost left a few times but ultimately decided to stay. She assured me that she “did not want to be seen as a victim or disempowered” and that she had made this decision for herself.

The interview left me feeling vexed and somewhat concerned for her well-being, particularly as I was one of the only people aware of these relationship issues. It was upsetting to hear how her husband’s actions had impacted her mental health and the ways he manipulated her. Yet, despite recognizing the abusive dynamics of her marriage, Sophia felt empowered by her decision to stay. I wanted to help, to find an escape for her, but could not. It was not only a transgression of professional boundaries to encourage Sophia to leave the marriage, but it was also explicitly against her wishes. In the dull silence after the interview, I realized that my desire to emancipate Sophia from her marriage was more about clearing my own conscience than it was about helping her: I had been made aware of a harmful situation and felt it my duty as a researcher and compassionate person to remedy it as a way of caring for my participant. Yet, this remedy was not to be found.

I am not the only one to experience this crisis of conscience. Others have highlighted the sense of powerlessness a researcher can feel after being confronted with participants in desperate situations, and the ethical dilemma of wanting to help but being unable to for any number of reasons (Bashir, 2020). Conversations on the issue of “vulnerability” tend to focus exclusively on participants, yet the despairing powerlessness and unresolved feelings some researchers experience in the field demonstrates how they too can be the vulnerable party. Katie Fitzpatrick (2019) talks about the anxiety and uncertainty that accumulates between the ethnographer and the field, particularly when leaving the field. The ethnographer is left wondering, Did I do the right thing by not breaking the participant’s naivety on a social issue? Should I have maintained my relationships with the participants after the project finished? Was I too brusque with that one participant? Did I unknowingly inflict hurt upon someone with my questions? Acknowledging that researchers can be as emotionally vulnerable as participants also challenges the assumption that power is aborescent and moves top-down from researcher to participant (Bashir, 2020). The vulnerable researcher shows how power is rhizomatic and dynamic; it shifts and shimmers about in unstable ways (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2020).

Employing a postqualitative trauma-informed approach can make these issues of catharsis and vulnerability a little easier to negotiate. As discussed earlier, my approach focuses on embracing the contradictions, confusions, and tensions of qualitative research. The intensity of leaning into trauma is what provides the pleasurable relief of catharsis; we must allow ourselves to feel troubled and overwhelmed to feel less burdened. “Doing empathy” and feeling into the trauma of others can be a sensitizing tool and a method of understanding and embodying the data. Furthermore, identifying oneself as a vulnerable researcher, or one who is at risk of vulnerability, challenges the idea that “good” researchers are emotionally impervious. We are often moved, and even bruised, when we develop a deep connection with our subject material. This demonstrates a heightened level of sensitivity and insight towards the research. Pre-empting the potential for vulnerability before entering the field can help soften the emotional impact of hearing difficult stories and the unresolved helplessness we are often left holding afterwards.

Insider Secrets

The emotional impact of hearing certain experiences can be amplified if you are an “insider” researcher. There is a strong emphasis in the research world on allowing researchers from marginalized communities to develop and lead studies related to their own communities. Indigenous data sovereignty and using community-led Indigenous research methodologies are one way for Indigenous peoples to actively disrupt the colonial project, resist imperial biomedical models of institutional research ethics, and assert self-determination (Walter & Suina, 2019). Trans researchers have a greater understanding of the relentless effects of heteronormativity on trans, queer, and other gender nonconforming individuals, and can apply and share this understanding when engaging with participants (Rosenberg & Tilley, 2021). Insider research can be an act of solidarity, and community insiders can work closely with gatekeepers to gain unique access.

Insider research is not without its risks. Researchers who conduct work in their own workplace may find themselves in a difficult position if they become aware of an issue that needs to be escalated to senior management but cannot be due to confidentiality (de Laine, 2000). Personal identity and one’s relationship to a community can be challenged when doing this kind of research (Nelson, 2020). When an insider commences a study, community members may feel a sense of suspicion as to the researcher’s motives and what the final product of the research might say about the community (Snellgrove & Punch, 2022). It can also permanently alter how the researcher views and relates to their kin (Haahr et al., 2014). Insider research can also bring a host of emotional tensions. Because the researcher can relate more intimately to the participant and their experiences, they may have a greater emotional investment in the interview and consequently have a more potent response to the participant’s stories (Ross, 2017).

I experienced this insider vulnerability with a participant named John. I was interviewing him about his kink practices, sexual identity, and sense of connection with the gay community. He spoke quietly about what it was like growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when queer people were considered criminals and mentally ill, and how he had put aside his same-sex desires to marry a woman. Forty years later, he was still with his wife and had two children whom he loved dearly. John described how his desire for men never dissipated, and through clandestine sexual encounters, he had found a way to fulfill his same-sex desires without his wife knowing. He spoke about his regret at not taking a different path in life, one in which he was more open about his sexuality, and that, in truth, he identified as a gay man. This was the first time he had spoken about this part of his life; I was the first person he had “come out” to. As a queer man myself, this interview hit hard. A nerve had been exposed. I had personal experience with aspects of his story, and being told I was the first person to hear this information contributed to the raw emotional impact.

John’s interview added a great deal of nuance and depth to my project. It was also emotionally arduous data to continually return to for analysis. In the period after John’s interview, I began to question the way I approached the field and my participants. I had been prioritizing my gender/sexual identity over my status as a researcher. That is, I was a queer person doing research in my community rather than a researcher who happened to be queer. It was tempting to blame this emotional, identity-based epistemological orientation as to why I had been so affected by his interview. However, this would be an explanation of convenience, and ultimately untrue. John had felt comfortable disclosing his secret sexuality to me partly because I was a member of the community he identified with, but more importantly, because he knew we would have no contact after the interview had finished (as per his request). My status as an anonymous insider allowed him to feel comfortable enough to speak his “true” sexuality into being. I could bear witness to this act of becoming, then disappear.

Some interviews haunt us after we have finished them. Like secrets, they can linger in the pit of our stomach or the back of our mind. The research takes on a psychic life of its own. The after-life of interviews is an example of how research can be a form of becoming that produces a continually-evolving reality. Our feeling bodies hold on to the emotional charge of interviews, which is insistently brought into the present during data analysis. The published data then carry on this affectivity into the future and are transformed in myriad ways whenever it is read, referenced, and reproduced in subsequent research and conversation. The dynamic positionality of insider/outsider-researcher/participant also highlights how engaging with participants and being in the field are events of becoming.

Viewing insider–outsider dynamics through a postqualitative trauma-informed research lens sweeps away the assumed power privileges of researchers. Insider researchers are particularly vulnerable to being negatively affected by the difficult stories of their community members because they may have similar lived experiences. They are still beholden unto community leaders and other gatekeepers for access to group members. There is also a greater personal and emotional investment in the research, which adds to the researcher’s vulnerability. And if the work is conducted with and by marginalized individuals, it is more politically charged and placed under greater scrutiny as it needs to appeal to the sociopolitical interests of the researcher, institution, and community group.

Reciprocity and Researchers Sharing Secrets

What happens when a participant asks you to disclose a secret? As a researcher who studies drug use, many of my participants are interested in knowing about my own substance use history. This curiosity can range from wanting to know if I have ever used drugs to asking if I know what addiction is like. I was conducting interviews with people who use methamphetamine and was asked by two consecutive participants if I had ever used methamphetamine. In both instances, I felt conflicted and unsure of what to say. It had been easy to build a pleasant rapport with these participants and they had been very open about their experiences with methamphetamine dependence, so it seemed only right that I give them an honest and substantial answer. But it also felt like a breach of personal and professional boundaries to offer details of my drug use history to these individuals whom I barely knew.

I decided to take the “safer” route with the first participant. I gave him a vague answer about how I had taken MDMA and other “softer” drugs a few times when I was younger. He accepted my answer and did not press me any further, but I could hear a note of disappointment in his voice. We said goodbye and a niggling sense of betrayal crept over me. While I have not tried methamphetamine, I do have experiences with problematic substance use. Perhaps he had dowsed this out in the interview and could tell he was speaking to someone with lived experience. Or maybe he just wanted to legitimate our emotional connection by knowing I could personally relate to aspects of his story.

I took a different approach with the second participant who asked me the same question. I told her that while I have not tried methamphetamine, I do have experience with substance dependence. She sallied out a sigh of relief and I could feel her body relax through the phone. I had felt uncomfortable disclosing this intimate piece of information to her, but it had changed the meaning of the interview for her in positive ways. She now felt far more secure knowing that her experiences of dependence and life story were going to be shared by someone with similar lived experiences.

My experience with these two participants highlights how researchers disclosing secret or sensitive parts of themselves can be a form of care when working with marginalized groups. It can foster a deeper sense of trust, intimacy, and connection, and allow participants to feel more secure in how their data will be interpreted and presented. Feminist researchers emphasize how reciprocity and sharing our own stories with participants can help to create a more balanced set of power relations and facilitate more free-flowing dynamics (Doucet & Mauthner, 2008; Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). Showing one’s vulnerabilities to a participant helps to humanize the researcher and establish kinship too.

However, sharing secrets with a participant can be dangerous for the researcher. Magdalena Harris (2015) describes the emotional risks that can come with disclosing too much personal information to participants, particularly when it comes to drug use and chronic illness. Oversharing can leave the researcher feeling vulnerable, reopen old wounds, and warm up substance cravings. She also highlights how our bodies can betray us and disclose our secrets against our will. The affective energy of an interview can reveal the true feelings of a researcher, such as discomfort, irritability, or fatigue; self-harm scars and tattoos, needle track marks and piercings, immediately tell their own story.

Researcher–participant reciprocity can be considered a type of emotional edgework. The researcher is tasked with sharing enough about themselves to establish a sense of trust and connection with the participant while also keeping sufficient emotional distance to maintain professional boundaries (Dickson-Swift et al., 2006, 2007). Marilys Guillemin and Kristin Heggen (2009) relate this negotiation process to the “zone of the untouchable,” or the more private areas of our life that only a select-few are invited to enter. Maneuvering between the drive to “level the playing field” by sharing intimate parts of our lives with participants while protecting those raw and tender areas within ourselves is a difficult and blurry boundary to navigate. Some have argued that actively engaging in these blurry “untouchable” boundaries is a feminist practice because it prompts the researcher to confront the complexities of ethical conduct and participant care (Yost & Chmielewski, 2012).

Postqualitative trauma-informed research is about allocating equal priority of care to the researcher and participant. Just as the participant can use an interview to tentatively explore/disclose sensitive areas of their life in confidence, so too can the researcher. Sharing one’s own experiences of trauma or hardship in an interview (when prompted by a participant) can lighten their emotional heft and make it easier to be more publicly vocal about the personal-political motivations behind the project. Researchers share the conditions of emotional safety in the interview space: we co-create a special arena where we may speak into being the experiences we have never shared before. However, researchers are not afforded the same guarantee of anonymity and confidentiality as participants, which complicates this safety somewhat. The participant knows their stories will be protected and contained, but we cannot be sure that our stories will be given the same grace. Choosing to invite a participant into one’s life can help fight cultures of silence. It also prevents one from becoming complicit in the erasure and stigmatization of certain experiences, identities, and bodies. Moreover, reciprocity can be considered a (tricky) practice of care that extends intimacy and highlights how entangled our lives/realities are, thereby further dissolving the researcher/participant divide.

Rapport, Refusal, and the Secrets of Silence

Rapport-building is a crucial element of any qualitative research that involves direct participant interaction. This process aims to create a comfortable emotional atmosphere and establish a sense of trust between the researcher and the participant. It also enables the researcher to engage more sincerely and empathetically with the participant and offer greater emotional support if/when the participant discloses tender secrets (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007; Miller, 2017). It has been highlighted as a particularly fraught area of ethics too. Many have discussed the gradual commodification of rapport-building alongside the emotional “deep acting” researchers use to strategically curate a self to better “manage” the participant (Duncombe & Jessop, 2002/2005; Thwaites, 2017). Moreover, researchers may inadvertently make the participant feel pressured to “match” the researcher and disclose information they may have otherwise omitted (Duncombe & Jessop, 2002/2005).

Effective rapport-building has the potential to distort the researcher–participant relationship. While the researcher may believe their participant understands the professional nature of the relationship, overrapport can lead the participant to forget and believe a friendship has formed instead (de Laine, 2000; Kirsch, 2005). This leads to a difficult ethical dilemma: is the participant sharing certain pieces of personal information because they do not want to alienate their “friend” or because they are comfortable sharing them with the researcher? Participants may feel enamored with the researcher’s undivided attention and enthusiastic interest in their life. This can culminate in participants feeling wounded and betrayed when the relationship abruptly ends after the researcher leaves and/or the project finishes (Kirsch, 2005). This often does not become apparent until after the fact. M. Carolyn Clark and Barbara M. Sharf (2007) describe how the care shown by the researcher and their ability to make the participant feel safe enough to tell their story can make the researcher feel like an “unwitting seducer.”

I had a similar experience to Clark & Sharf with a participant who, after the interview had finished, complimented me on my interviewing skills and how easy it was to open up about the more sensitive parts of his life, most notably his HIV status. Shortly after saying this, he quickly turned to me, and with an expression of slight panic, told me I could not name his workplace alongside his HIV status when writing up the results. I assured him that no identifying information would be included in the write-up, but to assuage any lingering concerns, I advised him that I would create a separate participant loaded with his experiences of living with HIV so there would be no chance of connecting his status with his workplace. It would seem that I too had become the unwitting seducer. The connection I developed with my participant did not carry any of the hallmarks of “fake friendship” (sense of deep familiarity, perceived intentions to continue the relationship beyond the project, social expectations that exceed professional boundaries), but it did fall into a peculiar gray area. I had felt a sincere and intimate bond with this man, which seemed to be mutual, but this bond was severed not long after leaving the interview. Had I accidentally stumbled into fake friendship territory myself?

Silence is another aspect of rapport (or potentially a lack thereof). In an interview, silence can often feel like a sign of failure. You had not worked hard enough to establish rapport; your questions were poorly worded or irrelevant to the participant’s life; you fumbled your questions and looked like a fool. Silence is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, these quiet moments can be rich forms of data in themselves. Silence is frequently used to plaster away secrets and scandals, so a lacuna in a story can inadvertently reveal that which has been sequestered to a dark corner (Davis, 2010). A participant’s silence can indicate their sense of shame about something and refusal to speak it into being (Owens, 2006). Speaking about trauma can induce a trauma response, so keeping silent about trauma can be a safety measure as well as a sign that someone has entered a trauma response. Silence might be a symptom of alexithymia where the voice fails to suffice (Brannan, 2011), or perhaps the person simply feels the question is unworthy of comment. Sometimes it is the researcher’s duty to keep silent when a participant is recounting a traumatic experience as a way of honoring and respecting what they have endured (Campbell, 2002). Moreover, participants withholding information and enacting silence can be a way for them to assert power and reinscribe their sense of agency by refusing to yield to the researcher’s attempts at drawing out their life experiences (Parpart, 2010). It can also be a way for them to resist rapport-building efforts that feel insincere or superficial.

I recently discovered the benefits of playing with silence in interviews and how fruitful this tactic can be. “Silent probing” involves remaining silent after a participant has answered a question. This prompts them to elaborate on their answer and divulge more information (de Laine, 2000). As qualitative researchers, we are taught a range of interviewing techniques designed to maximize the potential yield of “rich” data. Some of these techniques include using open-ended questions and subtle prompts, being emotionally tactful, showing empathy, and tailoring the interview schedule to each participant (McGrath et al., 2019). These interviewing techniques are arguably forms of manipulation. They are designed to engage the participant in such a way that they lower their defenses so we may obtain targeted pieces of information (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2005; de Laine, 2000). As mentioned above, the rapport-building process can be ethically ambiguous and potentially veer into unintentional manipulation. These risks can also be heightened for insider researchers because of the stronger sense of trust and solidarity that often emerges when engaging with community participants.

Postqualitative trauma-informed research is about expanding categories of data and viewing the silences and “dark matter” of interviews as important pieces of data. It is about placing the half-glimpsed among the “proper” data. Silence and omissions can point to a wide range of things, all of which should be taken into account during the data collection and analysis stages. Silence can indicate the participant is in a trauma response; participants can use it as a technique of enacting power and agency; keeping silent is a way for the researcher to show respect and can be a safety measure for participants; it is a social institution to be navigated; silence can be used as an interview strategy to elicit more detail from participants.

This approach is useful in the monitoring and tempering of the rapport-building process because of the emphasis on reciprocal trust, transparency, and communication. We cannot control or truly know what a participant is thinking or feeling, so we must rely on what we see and hear. We must trust the participant remains aware of our role as a researcher and does not see us as a new close friend and/or therapist. This can be achieved by being clear and open about your role as a researcher, your personal investment in the study, and asserting boundaries when needed. Qualitative research is an embodied experience that occupies a liminal social space and it is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure the research remains in the “right” liminal space.

Conclusion

Secrets hold enormous sway over us. They can provoke us to do uncomfortable things and bend us out of shape. Releasing a secret can feel liberating as well as terrifying. To hold a secret might be to hold a great deal of power or be broken by an impossible burden. Secrets have a fundamental relationship to qualitative research, characterized by ambiguity, contradictions, and a substantial number of ethical considerations and concerns. Interviews provide a unique opportunity for participants to purge their secrets in safety and know their veiled words will help improve the lives of others. Alternatively, participants can reclaim their sense of agency by refusing to divulge certain secrets to a researcher. Secrets often dwell in tender spots, so sharing them with a researcher may bring about spasms of pain and hurt. This can be a cathartic experience for some, whereas others might find it deepens the wound. Participants can also be subtly coerced into spilling their secrets in an interview and feel unable to remedy the situation.

Trucking with secrets is risky business for researchers. There are substantial emotional costs involved in repeatedly listening to the buried traumas of participants, particularly if they are telling this story for the first time to an “insider” researcher. Furthermore, being asked to reveal your own secrets in an interview can create an ethical dilemma. Researchers who are particularly adept at rapport-building and interviewing techniques may find it easier to elicit more detailed information from a participant, which can raise serious questions about whether coercion has occurred.

Postqualitative trauma-informed research is a potential way through this thicket of ethical issues. My unique model brings together these two complementary methodologies. It encourages researchers to improvise in the field, use emotion as a guiding tool and analytical device, and embrace the inherently murky and disorientating nature of qualitative research. Postqualitative trauma-informed research is about approaching research as a practice of intimacy, community care, and radical resistance against systemic violence. This methodology highlights how the field, collected data, and our experiences with conducting research are all forms of becoming that take on a life of their own that persists indefinite into the future. Postqualitative trauma-informed research is useful in the context of spilling secrets because it allows us to see the greater complexities of qualitative research and offers researchers a gamut of adaptable tools to help negotiate difficult situations. But most importantly, it provokes us to think differently about what research is and expand the limits of what research can be. To discuss secrets in qualitative research is to discuss how researchers and participants can and should care for each other, particularly regarding personal and emotional boundaries. It is through secrets, in all their messy glory, that qualitative research becomes meaningful.