4. Collaboration & Mutuality

Part of the process of creating safer and more supportive environments is exploring ways to involve participants more broadly in the research process. As noted above, this can include sharing research findings with them and their communities at different phases. Using participatory design or community-based participatory action research could also involve working with community groups, advocates, social workers, or other trauma experts from the beginning of framing research to ensure that questions are beneficial for the communities that you are working in and to identify any anticipatory issues or activations that could arise over the course of research. Community members can also help identify what questions to ask and culturally appropriate ways to collect the data. The more the approach can build power and have participants show up and speak as the experts rather than having their voices mediated by a researcher, the more collaborative the process and authentic the results can become.¹⁴

In conjunction with the previous principle (peer support), this can also mean thinking about the concept of “compensation” as more than just financial incentives for participating in research. This is especially important in contexts when we are researching products and services that our participants use. For example, we should ask ourselves what “pain points” are significant enough for us, after a session is completed, to assist a participant in finding a solution. In some cases, that is as easy as providing a warm handoff to customer support. A more involved example of this is how Airbnb researchers provided in-session support to COVID-19 first responders attempting to find temporary housing on their website (Hitchcock and Johnson 2021). The decision to do this also ended up improving the research: “[t]rying to solve responders’ issues while on the phone with them helped the researchers understand the urgency of the task at hand and empathize at a deeper level with how taxing the booking process was.” (ibid., 26)

5. Empowerment, Voice & Choice

Beyond fostering a safer and more supportive environment, one of the most important parts of treating trauma is ensuring that clients and patients are in control of their treatment. The same is true for everyone involved in a research project. Being trauma informed does not mean wrapping participants in “bubble wrap” and making decisions for them about what will or will not be traumatic. Instead, the goal is to provide them with all the information they need to make those decisions for themselves. This notion of choice and agency is interconnected with the concept of consent. This often leads to a hyper-focus on consent forms and, in some cases, a mistaken notion that consent is the same as a non-disclosure agreement or simply a “check off” within the research process versus understanding consent to be something that is informed, occurs prior to research, and, once given, must be sustained and is able to be revoked.

As mentioned above, the principles are interrelated and built upon one another. Consent cannot be provided unless all communications are transparent and fully understood (principle one). Likewise, consent can only be maintained through fostering and nurturing trust (principle two). Given the inherent power dynamics of research engagements, especially whenever there is any form of compensation for participation, it’s important for the research to find opportunities to shift the power dynamic towards the participant. Further, compensation need not just be a gift card for one hour of interview time. There are important hospitality practices happening in the field that are actively expanding how we also think about compensation: paying participants immediately via electronic apps, providing transportation and refreshments, and having on-site childcare. Each of these practices and more help us redefine our notion of what it means to support participants and foster consent.¹⁵

Alba Villamil and others also argue that an important part of shifting that power is helping participants recognize their ability to withhold or retract consent (Villamil 2020; Lee and Toliver 2017). At a minimum, this means clearly communicated consent procedures that help participants understand all aspects of the research and that enable participants to stop the interview at any time and still receive compensation. This also includes allowing interviewees to control the flow of the interview and control how much they choose to discuss a topic. Researchers should also consider taking steps to ensure participants feel empowered to take those actions. For example, Code for America always compensates participants at the start of a research engagement so they can feel more comfortable choosing to leave an interview for any reason (Rappin et al. 2020). Additional steps could also include re-engaging with interviewees and sharing how their data will be used in the final outputs to ensure they are comfortable with how they are being represented. Approached from this perspective, “consent” ceases to be a gate to pass through (or, more to the point, a form to sign) and becomes something far more open and fluid: an unfolding relationship.

Finally, we want to emphasize that, as with the rest of these principles, “empowerment and choice” must be extended to researchers. Beyond fostering mechanisms for researchers to practice self-care¹⁶, organizations must have procedures and protections in place for researchers to ensure that projects proceed at a pace that keeps them safe. And in cases where a researcher could potentially be harmed by participating—as already discussed in the example of BIPOC researchers who often must do additional emotional labor when working within communities they identify with or are asked to identify with—there should be the option to choose not to do the work.

6. Cultural, Historical & Gender Issues

Growing out of that last point, we need to continuously recognize that our work is always already situated within specific socio-historical contexts. It’s incumbent upon us, as researchers, to integrate that awareness into how we prepare for, conduct, and share research. As noted above under “safety,” that includes asking if conducting the research could harm a community or the researcher themselves. This may also lead one to ask if they are the right researcher for a specific engagement. This is connected to many of the discussions around decolonizing research and acknowledging the historic harms done by “expert researchers” on indigenous and other vulnerable communities throughout the years. (L. T. Smith 2012; Weaver 2019; Visser 2015) Likewise, due to the broader role that systemic oppression and racism have played in the creation of intergenerational trauma within BIPOC and other minority communities, this principle also asks us to proactively think about how our work can fit into various liberatory and anti-racist frameworks (Powell et al. 2022; Menakem 2017).

Designer and urbanist Liz Ogbu’s work on the “pre-conditions of healing” (Ogbu 2020) does a great job of centering the importance of understanding and acknowledging the complex histories of cultural objects and structures.¹⁷ In it, she writes:

[H]ealing won’t come about just through building more housing, establishing new bus routes, or even repurposing funds from a police budget into a new community center. It requires more; it requires holding space for the complexity that created and has sustained these wounds as well as doing the work to close the wounds in such a way that they can never reopen. In other words, continuing to drive cultural change forward also requires embracing the preconditions to healing. Before we can heal, we have to acknowledge the wounds: their existence, their depth, and their pain (Ogbu 2020).

While this might seem less applicable for those engaging in business-to-business or business-to-consumer research, it is still important to consider how the products and services we work, and have worked, on may have been involved in creating situations, directly or indirectly, that cause stress or harm for the people who used them.

BECOMING TRAUMA INFORMED AND BEYOND

With the principles introduced, we now turn our attention towards applying them to research and design processes. We believe that many reading this likely already engage in practices that can fit into one or more of the six principles. The advantage of adopting the SAMHSA framework, or a similar one, is that it provides a more approachable rubric for organizing and formalizing what is already being done, identifying gaps, and exploring opportunities to fill them. Doing this can be as simple as creating a matrixed document that contains a row for each of the principles and columns that list the corresponding actions taken to deliver on each principle. For a simple example of what this could look like, see the chart in “Triggers or Prompts? When Methods Resurface Unsafe Memories and the Value of Trauma-Informed Photovoice Research Practices” (Pichon, Teti, and Brown 2022). In the article, the authors include what steps were taken during their research and then have an additional reflective column for steps that could be taken in the future when conducting a similar project. Alternatively, columns could be used to capture what will be done in each major step of the research process or could correspond to different participant categories in the research or design process (e.g., “interviewees,” “researchers,” “stakeholders,” etc.). Regardless of what you choose, experimenting with this type of audit is an excellent way to take some initial steps toward adopting a trauma informed approach to your work.

As you think about those initial steps, keep in mind that being “trauma informed and responsive” is not an “either/or” binary state. There are always opportunities to improve one’s practice and things you’ll wish you had done differently. And, as demonstrated in the post-script, there will also be setbacks along the way. We have found it far more productive to think about becoming trauma informed as a continual practice rather than something you achieve. It is not something that can be developed overnight, let alone over the course of a single project. Instead, it is something that must be intentionally cultivated and mindfully grown over time for the good of all involved.

One challenge that many have faced on this journey is a desire to jump right to the “running” stage without doing the work of learning to crawl and walk. While the journey to developing a personal practice is always somewhat idiosyncratic, we feel that inspiration can be drawn from development models created by healthcare professionals that help demarcate major steps along the way. To this end, we have adapted a 4-phase developmental model created by the Missouri Department of Mental Health¹⁸ (Jones 2014) to help frame this discussion:

1. Trauma Aware. The journey begins by understanding more about the presence of trauma in our society, how it’s created, and how it can and continues to manifest. This includes considering how it will emerge within the context of any research engagement (regardless of subject matter).
2. Trauma Sensitive. The next phase is to begin to explore and understand the core principles of trauma informed approaches and how they can apply to your work. One also seeks to identify and “sense” the various ways that trauma can present itself in both researchers and research participants and starts to plan for how to minimize those opportunities. Researchers also begin to explore implementing trauma informed approaches with others within their organizations and/or with clients.
3. Trauma Informed. With the support of their organizations, the researchers begin to rework their research approach to integrate concepts from the core principles. This might include implementing proactive self- and group-care practices and peer and external support structures for researchers. Research work begins to be evaluated in part on how trauma informed it is.
4. Trauma Responsive. Being trauma informed is now the norm for both researchers and the organizations they operate within. Community organizations and collaborators are involved early in planning processes and reviewing research approaches. Researchers have developed relationships with and naturally seek out the assistance of experts from mental health and social work fields to collaborate on project scope, design, and implementation. Research embraces more participatory and liberatory approaches, including liberatory and anti-oppressive practices from mental health and social work fields. In addition to standing measures like the development of useful findings and insights, the mental and emotional health of participants and researchers are prioritized as key indicators of successful research and design efforts.

Becoming trauma responsive is an ongoing and unfinished process. The act of changing our personal mindset and approaches to research and design should come to create, and be reflected by, changes at the team and organization levels. In fact, as this model progresses, the responsibility for creating and sustaining trauma responsive practices shifts from individual researchers and designers to the organization itself. Individual practice is always shaped and constrained or supported by organizations we work within and for. In many respects, being trauma informed can run in direct opposition to the ways that many organizations currently are used to conducting research. The emphasis on moving more thoughtfully and with care, sharing power, and emphasizing not only providing informed consent but actively affirming all parties’ ability to opt in and opt out of that informed consent can be controversial. This could be seen as disruptive to the “optimal” ways of doing applied research that has evolved over decades of practice. It is, therefore, critical to take the time to educate and self-study these approaches within an organization to get buy-in.¹⁹ As we consider this progression of moving from aware to sensitive to informed to responsive, there is still much work to be done on charting approaches that help organizations move from one to the other.

To that point, it is important to call out that getting organizational buy-in can, at times, be extremely difficult. Researchers who are not also clinically trained and/or licensed to practice should not be required to screen or assess for trauma. To expect this would be reckless and irresponsible and the epitome of practicing without a license. However, attempting to enact wide-scale trauma informed change without a commitment to a multi-modal and interdisciplinary approach is often unrealistic and unsustainable. Without ongoing organizational perseverance, the responsibility for sustaining trauma informed practices tends to fall back to individual researchers and designers, who often lack the institutional or positional power to significantly shift policy. This lack of institutional support can then create conditions that lead to organizational moral pain, which increases the potential traumatization and retraumatization in the very practitioners seeking to make the system more trauma informed. As with the topic of organizational transformation, it will also be important to explore the topic of institutional betrayal and betrayal trauma theory²⁰ in the context of design and research spaces. We hope some of you reading this will pick up some of that work.

These challenges point returns us to why it is so important to shift our thinking about trauma informed and responsiveness from a state of “being” to “becoming.” Ultimately what we are talking about is not just fostering a change in practice or perspective but in ourselves, our teams, and our organizational structures. That is a process that will take time—years, if not decades—and will not be without setbacks. However, it is the right thing to do and, for reasons we are about to discuss, we are presently in a moment that makes this work especially relevant.