If you work in pharmaceutical or healthcare marketing research long enough eventually you will do research in sensitive areas like sexual health, mental health conditions, substance abuse, domestic violence, discrimination, financial hardship, political opinions, and religious beliefs. However, topics such as these can also pop in in other research when we least expect it.
Much can be found about how to safely maneuver these topics to protect the respondent such as prioritize building trust with participants, actively listening, allowing space for emotions, being empathetic, and ensuring anonymity while carefully crafting questions to avoid causing distress, and using ranges instead of specific values.
But little can be found on how we as moderators protect ourselves. It can be hard when a respondent speaks of suicide, harming themselves or others, acts of discrimination against them or the respondent just breaks down during the interview and cries. What do we do with our emotions? These types of interviews can stay with you long after the research is done.
Let’s gather for a virtual coffee chat to share what we have learned and how we have handled these situations. Hopefully we all leave with some new way of not only helping our respondent but also ourselves.
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