The Project
Researchers often engage with sensitive topics.
For example, social scientists investigating child and adolescent abuse in social care; educational researchers looking at student bullying and exclusion in schools, and discrimination of all kinds; medical researchers conducting cancer research and interacting with sick patients and distressed family members; public health scientists working with pandemic data, maternal and neonatal mortality rates, injuries in conflict zones; climate scientists recording environmental disasters; humanities researchers reading through painful historical narratives and violent archival materials; political researchers undertaking fieldwork in dangerous settings exposed to poverty and war; and social policy researchers working with the unemployed and homeless – the name just a few examples across the spectrum.
We’re inviting current and former Oxford University researchers, students and staff, from all disciplines and career stages, to take part in a short online questionnaire exploring experiences of vicarious or secondary trauma, emotional impact, and burnout in research.
Your insights will help us better understand how researchers are affected by their work — and guide the development of resources and training to support wellbeing, resilience, and safe research practices across disciplines.
All researchers: we kindly invite you to complete this online questionnaire.
Select researchers: In addition, if you are a University of Oxford student or staff researcher who has participated in a ‘Vicarious Trauma workshop’ you are invited to complete this second online questionnaire to evaluate the intervention – with the option of a follow-up online interview.
Questionnaire for researchers who have attended a University of Oxford Vicarious Trauma workshop
Through these surveys, and interviews, we hope to establish the extent of the challenge and its impact, as well as how we can develop resources for researchers. The goals of this project are to enhance research safety, resilience and wellbeing; support professional sustainability; and foster institutional research culture change.
