Trauma-Informed Research

What is 'trauma-informed care'?

Trauma-informed approaches have been utilized in, and across, many disciplines, including the medical, public health, mental health, and social work domains. A trauma-informed framework assumes that trauma experiences are pervasive, shifts dominant thinking from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”,  and challenges systems of power to reimagine interventions and resist approaches that may re-traumatize those in their care. While the framework has been adapted and refined over the last sixty years, the core principles continue to emphasize survivor and community empowerment. The major tenants of the approach include safety, trustworthiness & transparency, collaboration & mutuality, empowerment, voice & choice, peer support, resilience & strengths-based approaches, inclusiveness & shared purpose, as well as a consideration of cultural, historical and gender issues (SAMHSA, 2012). 

Gaps in trauma-informed practices in research methods 

While practitioner training on the impacts of trauma have been present for some time, the research community has largely not incorporated the same standards of care in research settings—despite the significant body of research focused on individuals and communities who have experienced/are currently navigating traumatic events. Through collaborative conversations with the research team and a preliminary review of the literature, we identified the following gaps:

  • Existing research standards assume that conducting trauma-informed research is synonymous with conducting ethical research. We do not believe that they are synonymous practices.

  • When research standards do include trauma:

    • Most framings center on whether or not people who have experienced trauma should be considered a “vulnerable population.” We contend that this view of trauma is too narrow, too often focused on a cost-benefit analyses, and portrays people who have experienced trauma as fragile and incapable of navigating safety without paternalistic limitations on their engagement (see also: Nonomura et al, n.d.). 

    • We find that attention is typically centered on implementing better practices for participants who are being asked to share their trauma experiences as part of the research process. This prioritization fails to recognize that trauma can show up and impact the research team, lead researchers, or the structures research is conducted through and within. Examining and restructuring all three levels is required for a trauma informed approach. 

      • It is often the case that the very best people to serve on research teams are those closest to the experience, and/or who shared an identity with the community being studied. However, these leaders are often asked to leverage their own traumatic experiences while navigating unsafe research conditions, teams and structures. It is critical that we invest in practices that prioritize safe(r), equity-driven research experiences for our staff, students, field workers, etc.

    • Similarly, participant-only considerations of trauma do not recognize how trauma may impact critical components of a research process, including much of what we consider “rigorous methods”, such as access, sample diversity, retention, data quality, rigor, etc. 

  • Despite the recent popularity of “advisory boards” and funder-required community partnerships , there is typically little to no direct involvement or decision-making power in the hands of survivors/community members in traditional research processes (we acknowledge the exception of many great CBPAR and PAR research approaches, which have often served as foundations for our work). 

  • We see no examples of trauma-based research processes that challenge the dominant extraction-exchange relationship between research and the community. We believe instead that research processes can and should be reimagined to be small opportunities for trauma-repair.

What we're doing in the Trauma-Informed Methodological Activism Lab

While it is critical to create research practices that prioritize and operationalize the formal tenets of a trauma-informed approach (i.e. safe(r) research experiences, transparency and trustworthiness, peer support, empowerment, voice and choice, etc.) we believe that these core values do not go far enough in creating equitable research experiences. Therefore, in addition to the original tenets of trauma-informed care, we are committed to being survivor-informed; opportunity-driven; diverse, equitable, inclusive, and intersectional; emotionally engaged (Campbell, 2013), flexible, and accountable for the mistakes we may make as we push for a different model of science. For a more detailed look at our guiding values, click here. 

Drawing from years of working with survivors, the neurodivergent movement, and a few exemplar models of survivor-led and equity-centered transformative research practices in the field (Voith et al, 2020), we offer a few examples below, of how we have instituted trauma-informed and equity-based practices at each of the three tiers of impact: 1) participants/survivors/community members 2) research teams, students, and PI’s and 3) systems/structures/organizations. 

Participants

  • Survivor-informed; Choice: Survivor consultants had tangible decision-making power over research decisions. For example, we changed our compensation options from financial-only payments to a range of options that allowed participants to exercise agency in selecting the best form of compensation for themselves. This range included traditional financial payment, volunteering their time, donating their payment to a survivor emergency fund, and an exchange of skills and labor that the research team would perform for them. This range recognizes that not all survivors are in need of, or agree with, financial compensation as the highest form of respect for their labor. This new range also supported a data-access challenge for researchers. Typically when funding runs out, data collection ends, therefore also ending opportunities for survivors to be included in the research. This approach however, removes agency from those most impacted and does not allow for individuals to participate for their own, non-financially motivated reasons. 

  • Collaboration; Trust and Transparency: We worked to provide survivors autonomy and agency over how their stories are told and used, including reading the sections written about them and providing the option to remove these entries, co-edit their sections and co-authorship credit. Additionally, the PI offers her own story of trauma as a starting chapter in major written works as a vulnerability exchange. She doesn’t ask survivors to provide their stories as data before she has done the same. 

  • Safety: We created and fundraised for an emergency, ‘no-strings-attached’ emergency pot of money that survivors could draw from when needed, and did not have to “perform” work in exchange for that money. For example we sent a former participant gas money to support her emergency exit from an abuser and we purchased goods and food items for a survivor-team member whose house was burned down.

  • Trust and Transparency: We developed a website before recruitment started that outlined the goals of the study, our values, team bios, links to the PI’s written work, and provided open-access consent forms and tech-safety procedures in an effort to be transparent about our agenda and to provide interested but hesitant potential participants an opportunity to do their own investigation and screening of us before going through the screening process themselves.

  • Equity: Hired survivor consultants at a wage that was equal to the PI’s consultant rate. 

  • Choice, Safety, Peer support: Participants were able to choose the format and degree to which they engaged with the research team. These options included being interviewed by the PI alone, having a survivor included in the interview, engaging in a survivor-only debrief after the interview, and/or completing a survey with open-ended interview questions so they could elect no to speak with someone from the team at all. 

  • Safety: Survivor-participants/survivor-consultants were never asked to turn their videos on, or “prove” their experience or identity. Members of the research team also signed contracts noting that they would not look up participant or consultant videos/images. 

Research Team

  • Equity; Collaboration; Trust: Recognizing that the people who are best equipped to work on a project like this are often blocked to the opportunity by the need for immediate income, we often paid team members in advance of their work–trusting that, like our academic colleagues, survivors and students would continue to perform their roles ethically, regardless of prepayment.

  • Choice; Opportunity-driven; Flexibility: As with study participants, we changed compensation options for the research team, students and survivor-consultants, expanding how we think about exchanges of labor to include what worked best for each team member at different times (e.g. financial payment, internship opportunities, academic credit, volunteer/professional development; co-authorship, etc.). 

    • Given the long history of exploitation in academia, it is important to note that all team members were initially funded, and the PI initially offered paid opportunities. However, after receiving pushback from survivors/community members about how these top down decisions remove agency from those most impacted, the PI changed compensation structures to meet different ideas of compensation that either felt more critical to the individual (choice) exchanging their labor and/or created space for working on a project for reasons that were not financially motivated.  

    • If applying a structure that expands compensation options beyond traditional means (monetary), it is crucial that the PI actively resist the draw of starting with non-funded positions as the exchanges often serve to benefit the PI, rather than those with the least power on the team and thus go against a trauma-informed and equity based model of research.

  • Flexibility; Opportunity-driven; Equity; Collaboration: The PI tried to uphold an 80/20 rule around staff and student workload. This meant providing the opportunity for people on the research team to work primarily on what interests them; or develop the skills they believed they needed for their future professional goals, rather than center workload around project-needs. The PI tailored work plans to these interests for eighty percent of their expected time, with the other 20% being project-based work. 

  • Safety: Providing paid time for members of the team to take care of themselves and manage secondary trauma.

Systems

A key component of a trauma-informed approach is that the framework must extend to include the broader systems and structures. Therefore, the following examples represent how the PI is leading this work at the structural-impact level:

  • Challenging existing funding structures by fighting for (equitable) pay for survivor-consultants, including for their creative work.

  • Challenging existing funding structures by creating non-financial compensation options and letting those with the least determine their own compensation option. This means re-imagining required internships as research assistants, building independent studies (where the PI does not receive additional pay for teaching an additional course), finding opportunities for training and professional development, co-writing with students, and having independent and changing compensation structures for each team member.

  • Challenging existing academic and educational structures by pushing for trauma-informed and survivor-led knowledge to be embedded into curricula for public service fields like criminal justice, social work, education, etc.

  • Challenging existing tech-funding agencies and academic/educational structures by pushing for gender-based violence curricula to be included in cybersecurity, cybercrime, cyberviolence, and technology-driven fields.

  • Challenging academic and scientific structures of legitimacy by releasing research findings on our website, before going through a peer reviewed process.