Unexpected Negative Participant Responses and Researcher Safety: “Fuck Your Survey and Your Safe Space,Trigger Warning Bullshit”

Available accessResearch articleFirst published online October, 2020

Unexpected Negative Participant Responses and Researcher Safety: “Fuck Your Survey and Your Safe Space,Trigger Warning Bullshit”

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Volume 44, Issue 4https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859920921752

Abstract

In this article, the authors revisit their experiences analyzing open-ended responses to an online questionnaire about the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. This piece initiates the discussion about the role of participant ethics in studies. People who did not fit the research eligibility requirements participated in the study and contributed vile remarks about the questionnaire and the authors. In addition to claiming the questionnaire protocol was biased and unethical, participants questioned the researchers’ professional abilities and wished death upon them. We dealt with concerns related to safety and the cumulative distress related to reading these negative and dangerous comments. We reflect on those concerns and the unexpected emotion work required to complete the study. Furthermore, we discuss the ramifications of participant sabotage and ill intent—and what that means for researchers trying to conduct ethical research.

Keywords

researcher safety cumulative distress online questionnaire U.S. Presidential election participant ethics

Fuck your survey and your safe space, trigger warning bullshit.

One of our participants included the previous statement in his open-ended questionnaire. Other participants told us to kill ourselves. Told us. To kill. Ourselves. The study was about Hillary Clinton supporters. The people saying these things? Not Clinton supporters. Instead, our study, originally focused on how Clinton supporters dealt with the loss of the 2016 election (DeGroot & Carmack, in press), had been infiltrated by pro-Trump supporters, intent on wreaking havoc on our study, and in some cases, used the research space to threaten our lives. This led us to revisit our data and ask: Researchers have an ethical obligation to protect their participants from harm, but what happens when participants respond in ways that threaten the health and safety of the researchers themselves?

In addition to advocating for the safety and emotional comfort of participants, maintaining researchers’ physical and emotional well-being has been identified as areas of concern (Bahn, 2012; Bloor et al., 2010; Emerald & Carpenter, 2015; Hubbard et al., 2001; Mitchell & Irvine, 2008; Moncur, 2013; Rager, 2005; Woodthorpe, 2009). The authors have studied various aspects of death and dying, so we are well informed of the emotional labor that sensitive topics entail (Carmack & DeGroot, 2013-2014; see also Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Kumar & Cavallaro, 2018). However, the majority of these essays focus on how researchers react to the emotional challenges of a topic or context of study, such as hearing stories of domestic abuse. What happens when the emotional challenges are the result of unsolicited participants lashing out at researchers?

Generally, our research focuses on communicative issues of death and dying, such as griefwork and bereavement social support. We are not political communication or political science scholars. However, in the months following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, we observed an increased amount of bereavement behaviors and grief-related comments about Clinton’s loss both online and offline. As such, we wanted to explore these postelection behaviors using grief as a framework to make sense of those emotions. We anticipated a few negative comments about our study, but we were not prepared for the amount of vitriol and fury directed at us as researchers. Participants who did not meet the eligibility requirements of the study responded to our questionnaire and questioned our skills as researchers, engaged in ad hominem attacks, and wished death upon us. Numerous authors call for researchers to examine the short- and long-term effects of research on ourselves and consider the risks to our own safety and well-being (Chiswell & Wheeler, 2016; Emerald & Carpenter, 2015; Mitchell & Irvine, 2008; Sharp & Kremer, 2006); however, these scholars are often discussing fieldwork spaces associated with dangers. But how are we to do this when it was completely unexpected? We recruited in spaces one would assume included only people who are eligible for our study, and the focus of the project was explicitly identified in the call and informed consent. Sharp and Kremer (2006) pointed out over 10 years ago, the lack of discussion of researcher safety in spaces and with topics not normally associated with danger, but to date, there is still limited research on how to navigate researcher safety when engaging in “safe” research. Our experiences with this study serve as another call for a more thorough investigation of researcher safety. We discuss the unexpected negative responses from participants, how we dealt with those responses, and the safety and ethics issues that arose from the experience.

Researcher Safety Work in the Wake of Intrusion, Flaming, and Rhetorical Killing

As scholars who often turn online for access to our participants and discourse to study death, grief, and loss (e.g., DeGroot, 2012-2013, 2014, 2018, DeGroot & Carmack, 2012, 2013), we have traversed a complicated landscape of the pain and destruction that comes with death, the heartbreaking agony of reconstructing lives after loss, and the emotional labor that comes with talking about, with, and through the complexity of death and dying. Approaching this topic, the grief associated with the loss of a Presidential election, we were attuned to the emotional state of our participants. To use the language of scholar such as Cloud (2009), Herring et al. (2002), Jane (2015), and Vera-Gray (2017), we were unprepared for the intrusion of those not wrestling with grief and the trolling and flaming communication they would use in their attempt to rhetorically kill our research and us.

Online spaces such as blogs, forums, list-servs, and chat rooms serve as spaces for safety for women and other marginalized groups (Morahan-Martin, 2000); whereas public spaces allow everyone to be viewed and participate, online spaces can be regulated and controlled in order to create an open and inviting communication climate. However, this also means that online spaces can be invaded, infiltrated, or intruded. For researchers, this means individuals can come into a space not for them and participate in studies not designed to privilege their voices. In her explanation of stranger intrusion, Vera-Gray (2017) argued that researchers must manage “the right amount of panic” in order to attend to researcher safety, especially when using online spaces for recruitment and data collection (p. 74). Of particular concern is how to navigate intrusions designed to undermine, disrupt, or negate participant or researcher experiences. Researchers must engage in safety work (Kelly, 1988; Vera-Gray, 2016, 2017), where they must maintain the safety of the participants and the researchers from the vitriol, violence, or suggestion of violence to their bodies and livelihoods.

Trolling and flaming are two rhetorical strategies design to sow division between individuals communicating in online spaces. Trolling purposefully tries to provoke, disrupt, and undermine others (Herring et al., 2002) while flaming expresses hostile and vitriolic emotions at other people (Kayany, 1998). These forms of e-bile (Jane, 2015) make it easy for individuals to engage in sexist, racist, and misogynist communication under the safe cover of online anonymity (Herring et al., 2002). Ultimately, the use of flaming, trolling, and intrusion has one purpose: to deliver rhetorical blows designed to “kill” an individual by discursively and symbolically demolish or destroy them (Cloud, 2009, p. 458). We experienced our own attempts at being “rhetorically killed” by participants in our Clinton loss study. Not only did these participants engage in flaming, trolling, and rhetorical killing, they also purposeful sought out to invalidate our study and the experiences of our participants.

The Original Study

To gather participants for our study on postelection grief, we posted calls for participants on various social media sites and in Facebook groups that were specifically created in support of Clinton’s presidential run (e.g., regional Pantsuit Nation groups). The call included eligibility requirements for the study (must be at least 18 years old and eligible to vote in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election). In addition, the call stated that we were “examining individuals’ emotional disappointment with Hillary Clinton’s Presidential election loss.” As a qualitative study, we explicitly stated that our focus was on those people who were disappointed or saddened by Clinton’s loss; we were not interested in the general population’s reaction. We were very clear in our research purpose through both our participation call and research objective identified on the consent form.

The link to the qualitative questionnaire went live at 5:00 p.m. on December 13, 2016. Within 24 hours, 212 people had responded to the questionnaire. Another 180 people responded in the next 24 hours. We kept the questionnaire open until mid-January 2017 when the responses dwindled to about one per day. We closed the questionnaire and downloaded the data for analysis. Upon a quick scan of the responses, we noticed some negative comments that ranged from mildly rude to downright vulgar and boorish. We quickly conferred with each other to determine how to continue with the analysis. We decided to eliminate the Trump supporting participants from our data set (a step in the thematic data analysis process endorsed by Braun & Clarke, 2006), as the purpose of the study was bereavement rather than celebration. We explained this decision further in our first manuscript on the topic:

A total of 583 people originally completed the study’s online open-ended questionnaire; however, 383 were removed from the study because they did not meet the study requirements or were incomplete. During our data collection, Trump supporters infiltrated Clinton groups, including Pantsuit Nation, with a purpose of writing negative and hurtful comments and creating strife in the online communities (Pantsuit Nation even shut down for a period of time in order to identify and remove those individuals). Those individuals had access to our survey call and completed our survey in an attempt to invalidate our data (as they noted in their answers, such as “You are whiny snowflakes protesting the outcome of the election”). Participants who noted they voted for Trump or wrote comments not congruent with our study were removed for this analysis. (Carmack & DeGroot, 2018, pp. 471–472)

This paragraph only hints at the negativity directed toward us. After completing two manuscripts from the data about Clinton’s loss (Carmack & DeGroot, 2018; DeGroot & Carmack, in press), and removing incomplete questionnaires, we were left with hundreds of negative comments made by people who claimed to have voted for Trump/Pence. The authors debated about what to do with the data. A traditional qualitative analysis of negative responses? A research essay about what happens when participants purposely try to corrupt the data? In the end, we decided to focus on the impact of reading those comments on us as researchers, in part, because we had never been taught how to deal with data like this. This would be our way of making sense of the situation. We revisited the data and defined our data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006) as the data shared by people who voted for Trump/Pence. As in the original study, we individually read through the comments, using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), comparing each comment to the next in order to establish initial codes. We compared these codes and resolved any differences. Then, we organized the codes into themes based on commonalities. These themes are discussed later.

The Onslaught

Over half of the people who voluntarily took our questionnaire insulted our research design, professional integrity, research topic, and us personally through ad hominem attacks. These study “participants” had numerous complaints about the questionnaire, us (the researchers), and the education system. They purposefully participated in our study to skew our results and, as several noted, to invalidate our entire study because they thought it was “stupid” to study the experiences of Clinton supporters. From the original data corpus, 259 people indicated that they voted for Trump/Pence in the 2016 Presidential election and completed the questionnaire. This included 213 men (82.2%), 35 (13.5%) women, and 11 people who identified their gender as “other” (4.2%). The majority of the participants identified as heterosexual (n = 225; 86.9%) and 185 (71.4%) were White. After agreeing to the conditions of the consent form, they answered demographic questions (including who they voted for) and questions about their feelings regarding Clinton’s loss. Specific questions included, “How did you cope with the negative emotions associated with Hillary Clinton’s loss in the election?” and “When you indicate your disproval of the election results, how do others react?”

In order to clearly communicate the enormity of the nefarious responses by Trump supporters, we provide unedited exemplars, presented in the same way participants wrote their response to our questionnaire, in order to not censor the language or intended message of these participants (Jane, 2012). Like Cloud (2009), we weave together participants’ comments with our own understanding and interrogation of the experience. This marriage of participant data and our reflections serves as a way to ground our analysis and show how our experiences are part of a larger sociopolitical reality of hatred, anger, and derision toward academics and research exploration (Cloud, 2009).

Our Protocol Is Biased

At the top of the consent form, which all participants (hopefully) read before agreeing to participate in the study, we explained, “The purpose of this study is to examine individuals’ emotional disappointment with Hillary Clinton’s Presidential election loss. We aim to explore the negative emotional responses and potential coping mechanisms following Clinton’s election loss.” It appeared that many of the negative commenters did not read the study call or the purpose statement in the consent form. As a result, people who were not unhappy with the election outcome completed the questionnaire and had a difficult time comprehending why the questions were “slanted” toward being upset at the election results. For example:

This survey is pretty biased and should only be for those that are sad/angry/upset that Clinton lost.

This survey is blatantly biased and only reinforces the mistrust many feel for academia. You should be ashamed for posting it, and reconsider your life choices. Feel free to contact me at: [email]

This was a terribly designed survey, and also assumed that a majority of the people willing to take this survey would be liberal and a Hillary supporter.

These questions are skewed and biased and not based on any scientific method. They are phrased in a way to skew your results and cannot be taken seriously in any empirical setting.

I find it telling that you are so presumptive as to think that everyone should somehow be in dire straights [sic] over this election.

Survey is very left wing slanted.

This is a horribly done study that makes huge assumptions that everyone taking it must have had only one response.

The mere assumption that survey respondents would be sad about the election is telling. I expect better from universities—that they would acknowledge a spectrum of results and feelings.

These comments underscore a few important study design issues. First, participants did not seem to have an understanding of qualitative research methods and how focus, questions, and approaches differ from quantitative research methods (Patton, 2015). Participants’ critique of the questionnaire was grounded in a positivist or postpositivist perspective (e.g., “These questions are skewed and biased and not based on any scientific method”) and, whether they realized it or not, they were using quantitative understanding of validity and reliability to assess the questionnaire. The heavy focus on “bias” clearly illustrates their positivist and postpositivist perspectives. Part of this focus may have been because of the delivery method. Rather than use traditional qualitative methods (e.g., individual interviews or focus groups), we chose to use an online questionnaire, where participants could write in their answers. Questionnaires are so commonplace in everyday life (Stassen & Carmack, 2019) that participants may assume a specific delivery format is related to a specific method.

In addition, the study does have a narrower focus (Clinton supporters who were upset about the election results, feelings of loss and grief), which is standard for qualitative research. It is not uncommon, when trying to get at the experiences of a specific group of people, to narrow the focus of the study. We were concerned about the emotional and coping experiences of a specific group of people. This would be no different than if we asked people who had recently experienced a death to talk about their grief and coping (which is a common approach to studying grief and loss). In fact, the questions asked of participants could easily be used in a study examining more traditional forms of grief and loss and no one would question their validity. Interestingly, participants found this approach problematic (e.g., “the survey should only be for those who are angry or sad about the election”), even though we specifically stated this purpose in the call and on the consent form.

Some people took their insults a bit further and questioned the education system as a result of their assessment of our questionnaire:

You really should try to be a bit less overtly biased in surveys such as this. Things like this are even further eroding my respect for academia, and it wasn’t all that great before taking this silly survey.

This was an absolute disgrace of a survey, totally biased and repetitive. This is why our college graduates can’t succeed in life after school. There isn’t enough room here to write how I feel about the liberal crybabies that are acting out about the election. Grow up! If I can survive 8 years under the socialist policies of obama, you can survive under the policies of Trump.

I’m a faculty member at a university myself, and this survey is terrible. Were you drinking yourself into a coma when you made this survey? Your questions are becoming repetitive.

Other adjectives used to describe the questionnaire included pathetic, dumbass, biased, insane, a perfect example of bigotry, idiotic, disturbing, and silly. Participants who made these comments used the focus of the questionnaire simply as an entrance to critique the U.S. higher education system. These feelings, however, were related to the participants’ belief that higher education pushes a liberal and socialist agenda on students. It was interesting that one participant here used their status as an academic as a justification for their evaluation of the qualitative questionnaire; however, aside from saying, it was “terrible” and they thought the questions were repetitive (we never asked the same question twice), they could not identify specific problems with the questionnaire. The questions were specific to exploring the loss and coping strategies Clinton supporters may have experienced. The participants’ comments here are designed to invalidate the legitimacy of our research by expressing their concern for the research topic and ability to design research studies. These thinly veiled “concerns” attempt to “equate experiential realities” by suggesting what is and is not “good” research (Vera-Gray, 2017, p. 73). This type of trolling, undermining while attempting to be sincere (Herring et al., 2002) is especially insidious because they attempt to use research specific language (e.g., biased) or their unsupported claim of similar academic status (e.g., “I am a university professor, too”) to suggest we are incompetent.

We Are Unethical Researchers

Another group of insults centered on disparaging our research ethics and professional integrity. In these cases, participants questioned not only the study design but also our ethics. Whereas the previous critique was about our skills as researchers, these comments speak to how we (un)ethically approach research, participants, and the exploration and presentation of knowledge.

I know you are going to make this survey say whatever the hell you want so have fun changing facts and massaging people’s little emotions. I hope government money was not spent on the stupid study. If it was I’m telling Trump.

If you read this far, please send me an email. I would be impressed if you read past my voting choice and my comments above. [included email address]

You probly will disregard my survey because it dose not like up with your opinion. But I doubt you read the whole thing any way. Probly just delegated it when you saw my first few responses. Teach kids to deal with things in the world rather than complain. The world is a shitty place, prepare them for it

This research is heavily biased toward liberals feeling bad about the election results and the wording has a strong tendency to illicit the negative feedback that I can only assume the researchers were trying to show how the election has negatively impacted liberals.

Liberalism is a mental disease. You are ruled by your emotion, as demonstrated by this asinine survey. GROW UP. The proctors of this waste of time are PhD holders, which totally looses [sic] my faith in the US edu, err indoctrination system. You created this epidemic with participation trophies and no proper discipline. This election is exactly what this country needed and you liberals deserve.

Several participants questioned what we would do with their data or even if we would read their comments once we determined they did not meet the study criteria. A number of participants even included their email addresses as a way to “test” our ethics, asking that they be contacted if we actually did read their responses. Not only did we read all their responses (we discuss that more later), but DeGroot emailed every single participant who provided an email address to let them know we read their comments. This was a brief and standardized response designed to acknowledge that we did in fact read their comments. It was another example of the researchers demonstrating ethical research practices. One person politely wrote back thanking us for contacting him.

We found the number of comments questioning our ethics disturbing because we pride ourselves of being ethical researchers, and because we study grief and loss, spend a lot of time attending to the thoughts, feelings, and comments from participants (Carmack & DeGroot, 2013-2014). Even though these participants’ comments were not used in our original articles, it was because they did not meet the study criteria, not because of what they said. If we had been using a more traditional qualitative method, such as individual interviews or focus groups, we would have ended their participation at the beginning because they did not meet the study criteria. In our design, however, they received the chance to express their concerns and thoughts.

Interestingly, many of our participants, in their attempts to call into question our ethical practices, engaged in unethical behavior themselves. For example, when asking about participants’ gender, they identified as a “fox,” “catdog,” “shapeshifting reptilian,” and, “Attack Helicopter.” Many of them said that they were purposefully trying to “throw off the results” of our study or make our data set unusable. This is important to note because although they chose to participate, every answer, even down to demographic information, was designed to corrupt our study. In this way, their intrusion was twofold: one intrusion into Pantsuit Nation and one intrusion into our study. As Vera-Gray (2016) noted, the overall goal of intrusion is to insert oneself into a space where they are not invited in order to cause disruption and upheaval. It was not enough for Trump supporters to invade the safe space of Pantsuit Nation; they also had to invade the safe space of the study to mock and belittle the loss experiences of Clinton supports and undermine and, as we discuss later, threat the safety of the researchers. This trolling, designed to undermine our research, intellectual, and professional goals, was especially galling in light of their comments that we were unethical.

Our Research Topic Is Ridiculous

Many people believed the topic of this research to be unworthy of study. They wrote comments such as “are you serious???,” “For gods sakes. Shut up!!!,” and, “You guys serious about this? Are you freeking kidding me?” They told us to “stop wasting everyone’s time.” Contributors also stated the following:

This survey has to be a joke. These are grown men and women crying because someone they thought should win didn’t.

People like those that wrote this survey are the reason we are in the position we are in now. Cry all you want, 8 years of liberal policy is the reason Trump got elected. Everything you all accused us of being and doing has backfired. You all are guilty of your own accusations. Stop projecting.

The pussification of America lead [sic] to this sorry assed survey.

They really need to get over it. No one ever published a survey asking about my feelings after Obama was elected.

The people have spoken. Trump is going to be our next President. People need to get used to that fact, stop whining over it, and make better use of their time than pouting and creating silly and juvenile surveys.

Tracy (2010) identified worthy topic as one of the foundational criteria for evaluating the rigor of qualitative research. To demonstrate worth, the topic must be relevant, timely, significant, and interesting. As we note in the introductions of our articles, we noted the high number of news articles focused on Clinton supporters’ grief, the increased number of people seeking professional counseling because of the election, and the larger academic and societal impact losses have on American life (Carmack & DeGroot, 2018; DeGroot & Carmack, in press). All of this was done to establish the timeliness and significance of the topic. In addition, the unique focus on loss and coping (DeGroot & Carmack, in press) and metaphor use in political communication (Carmack & DeGroot, 2018) extend academic thinking about these topics and offer new and different theoretical and practical implications for the study of similar topics. Inherently, the comments made about the research topic itself attacks our skills as researchers to know and identify worthy topics of study. What does it mean that they responded this way? It speaks to the divide in our nation based on politics, and it speaks to the increasingly common nature of using anonymous methods to attack people rather than engage in civil discourse.

The focus on “ridiculous” was not just relegated to our research topic. Some people saw our “ridiculous” research as a marker of academia’s downfall:

The fact that this survey exists is a sad commentary on the state of “higher education” today. I’m fearful for the future if this country if this generation continues down the path it’s [sic]on. As a potential employer I’m taking note of institutions that are catering to the demands of these kids and will avoid them at all costs.

As a[n alum of one of the author’s schools], I am very upset that the current group of students there are so fragile that something like this exists.

This survey is indicative of the brainwashing being done in America today. Whoever created this should be ashamed.

This is stupid and you had better not be wasting my tax dollars for this biased shit.

This critique is similar to using the “bias” of our questionnaire design to serve as a representation of the downfall of academia. In this case, participants seemed to think that a study topic (which they did not deem worthy) was directly related to lack of worth of the academy. Several participants noted a concern that “tax dollars” funded the project (we did not have any grants related to this study). Interestingly, participants assumed that somehow the study of this topic would be passed on to students and make them unhireable (which speaks to a larger issue of believing students lack the strong constitution of their beliefs and can be easily swayed). Much like before, the underlying assumption here is that the larger academy is trying to indoctrinate students into a liberal/socialist agenda, which makes all our work suspect.

We Are Crybabies

Some people resorted to simple ad hominem attacks such as calling us “emotional idiots,” “crybabies,” “libtards,” and, “fucking retarded.” Others declared that we “are truly beyond pity. You need to grow up and get over yourselves,” and that we “are another example of everything wrong with our society.” At no point did we say we felt the same as the individuals we were interested in studying or what our political affiliation was. Participants assumed that because we were studying this topic, it must be because we are “liberal crybabies.” Other participants said:

Liberal idiots such as yourself and this slanted survey are the problem in today’s society. Get over it you sissies, you lost. Your candidate was one of the most corrupt in this nations history and the majority of Americans know it.

Don’t be a biased, fragile, crybaby. Biased surveys such as this are, in effect, large group pity parties that amplify emotional weakness and social failure rather than actually serving the persons who feel disappointed.

You lost. Get over it. Suck it up you weak minded arrogant uncultured pathetic entitled crybabies. Your reactions disappoint me. What do we do when we fall down? We get back up and soldier on. Lose with dignity and fight harder next time.

[I will] CONTINUE TO CELEBRATE AND FIND OUT WHAT KIND OF FOOLS ARE PUTTING OUT SUCH STUPID RIDICULOUS SURVEYS OUT. YOU MORONS NEED TO EXAMINE YOUR VALUES. IT IS EVIDENT THAT HILLIARY IS A LIAR, MURDERER, ENABLER, TRAITOR. NOW PLEASE, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

These comments exemplified the participants’ engagement in the rhetorical kill (Cloud, 2009). Here, participants attempt to use the power of naming (e.g., snowflakes, libtards) as a way an identify foil to show how Clinton supporters and the researchers were “less than.” In addition, they used use these comments to highlight the “problematic” nature of emotion and emotional expression; crying and sadness are weaknesses that should be hardened. This is another attempt to rhetorically foil the participants and researchers by invoking their vulnerabilities and framing them as negatives (Cloud, 2009).

Inherently, most of the comments mentioned in this article posted by these participants fall into the ad hominem category. In their study of ad hominem attacks on scientists and scientific claims, Barnes et al. (2018) noted that the lay public tend to focus on attacks related to the misconduct, conflict of interest, education, and sloppy study design or argument as ways to undercut scientific claims. Although participants did make many of these claims about us, their larger attacks are related to less to us and more to their disdain for a particular political party. The comments shared earlier highlight the vitriol present in today’s political climate and how individuals feel embolden to rely on ad hominem attacks to communicate about difference in feelings.

We Should Die Relatively Soon

Tied to the ad hominem attacks, a handful of moved beyond insulting us to telling us we should commit suicide or die by some other means. Several participants even volunteered to kill us (in case we lacked the willpower to kill ourselves).

GET A FUCKING LIFE! EMBRACE REALITY! Or just kill yourself. It’s whatevs!

FUCKING snowflakes just need to kill themselves already. Save me the trouble.

Go crawl into a hole and die you worthless liberals! YOUR [sic] the reason we were even in this mess to begin with.

die in a fire, or drown

Fuck liberals. Fuck feminism. And fuuuuuckk pussy ass snowflake millennials. I pray that this message reaches you and triggers you so much that you kill yourselves. I would get such a freedom boner from learning of your suicide.

Death threats or communication encouraging individuals engage in suicide illustrate how hostile flaming and e-bile can get. As an expression of raw and unadulterated emotion, death threats use explicit language (die, kill, and suicide) to control and discipline others (Jane, 2015). Rather than disparaging us (as the other comments did), these comments demonstrate a lack of humane constraint. Unfortunately, as Jane (2015) pointed out, this type of extreme and explicit direction of violence is accepted and even expected in online communication. Death threats posted online are so common now they are considered “a way of life” (Eli, 2019). There is not much to say about these comments other than they are abhorrent and unnecessary. They not only speak to the previous mentioned vitriol but also the changing belief in American society that this level of incivility is accepted. Popular press outlets often publish accounts of researchers receiving death threats because of their research (e.g., Bonn, 2018; Mann, 2016; Waldman & Heikkinen, 2018). Many of these recent accounts tie their threats to the current political climate in the United States. Many of our original participants in the Clinton loss study talked about the rise of vitriolic language coming from Trump and Trump supporters and worried about their safety. We do not believe that if participants’ identities were known or we had used more traditional face-to-face methods, they would say these types of things to our face. Unfortunately, online anonymity with no fear of discovery or consequence is a seductive and empowering thing. The anonymity of these comments makes it difficult to engage in a pedagogy of accountability (Cloud, 2009), where researchers and intruders can engage in civil discourse and begin to learn and grow together. In addition, it would have been easy to ignore these or treat them as just part of the research process. However, doing that would legitimize this type of communication. Although we are not able to call out our participants like Cloud (2009) was able to, including their comments here serves as a small act of challenging the belief that this type of discourse is normal and acceptable.

Our Reflection and Implications for Future Researchers

What we anticipated to be fairly straightforward study about grief experiences led to unexpected and completely abhorrent comments directed at us personally. Regardless of anyone’s political leanings, it is difficult to ignore the viciousness present in some of our participants’ statements. As death communication scholars, we constantly have to negotiate the emotional labor of hearing about loss and tragedy. Hearing others’ stories of grief is emotionally taxing, but we have developed coping strategies to help us deal with the emotional impact of those narratives. This was something different. Never have we experienced hate or vitriol directed at us. In our attempt to deal with these negative comments, we dealt with a number of safety and ethical concerns.

These types of comments appeared to be attempts to silence or delegitimization the “other” (described by Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1996). A year after our initial research concluded, research on alt-right, Trumpism, and White masculinity in online spaces was conducted and published (see Lumsden & Harmer, 2019 for a collection of such research). This research was framed within negative communication behaviors online, including trolling, flaming, and harassment. Harmer and Lumsden (2019b) identify online othering as a term that “encapsulates the myriad power contest action and abusive behaviours which are manifested on/through online spaces (including, e.g., as racism, Islamophobia, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism) and which are resisted and challenged by various social actors and groups” (p. 2). We did not feel as though we were othered in terms of age, gender, race, or physical appears, as highlighted throughout Lumsden and Harmer’s (2019) edited book. Rather, we were othered due to assumed party affiliation—and without instigation.

The (In)visibleness of Participants and Researchers

We know that online disinhibition (Suler, 2004) is one aspect of online communication that can both help and hurt open-ended qualitative online research. This refers to the phenomenon where people “say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say and do in the face-to-face world” (Suler, 2004, p. 321). On one hand, the anonymity provided by the internet allows people to feel “safe” when disclosing information to researchers. On the other hand, people can feel uninhibited and brave enough to say negative comments that they would never say to someone’s face, which is likely the case with the negative comments presented earlier. These people apparently viewed our questionnaire as an outlet to share their disdain for anyone who supported Clinton. Furthermore, Harmer and Lumsden (2019b) argue it is difficult to regulate because anonymity is enabled by the internet platform (i.e., due to online disinhibition). Reflecting on our design, we could have added the eligibility qualifier of “I am upset by Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 Presidential election” as a checkbox next to “I agree to the conditions of the consent form,” but we did not. We assumed that people would read the participant call and the consent form purpose statement.

Also, we recruited participants in a Clinton support group, so it did not occur to us that individuals would be in the group who did not support Clinton. Of course, there was also no way for us to anticipate the group would be infiltrated by Trump supporters with a purposeful goal of causing strife and derision. Although qualitative research design asks researchers to anticipate struggles in research and “be prepared for the unexpected” (Kumar & Cavallaro, 2018, p. 651), there are limits to what, realistically, researchers can anticipate and prepare for related to their study. Our experience adds to those unexpected events: Participants who enter into the research space with ill intent. What can you do when individuals participate in a study with the expressed desire to disrupt and invalidate? Other than setting up markers at the beginning of the study to identify these participants and excluding these participants’ comments, there may be no other way to prevent participation. However, this unexpected event does speak to a larger concern about the “good faith” of research. We enter the research space with good intentions; it never occurred to us that our participants might not all do that as well.

Of course, the most distressing comments were the ones encouraging or hoping death for us simply because we decided to study this topic. These types of concerns are similar to Chiswell and Wheeler (2016) and Sharp and Kremer (2006), who worried about their safety when out in the field interviewing farmers. It is especially concerning that individuals feel emboldened enough that they feel they can and should write those kinds of things. Our names and contact information are clearly available on the consent form and online—anyone could come find us at our offices or follow us home. If they looked into it further, they could also determine exactly when and where we would be teaching our classes. We would be remiss if we said these comments did not bother us or make us question our safety. One of the authors works at a university who created a risk assessment office with a focus on faculty safety because of a similar situation with another woman faculty member. Although we feel generally supported by our (mostly male) department chairs, colleagues, and deans, as Cloud (2009) explained, for women faculty, these threats are different:

I believe that the impact of such mail on its female recipients—who may have internalized gender-based insecurity about professional qualifications and physical appearance, and who may have real reason to fear workplace discrimination or physical/sexual assault—is compounded in ways that my male colleagues do not experience. One of these colleagues once advised me to ignore my hate mail, saying that he never gave a thought to his own. I found myself starkly reminded that (generally) men and women, by virtue of living in sexist society, experience the world very differently from one another. (p. 471)

Inherently, comments suggesting or demanding violence to us are designed to discipline and dehumanize us (Cloud, 2009). Of course, there is an element of gender dynamics at play here; as women, we are at higher risk for researcher harassment and violence. However, much like Sharp and Kremer (2006) reflected, “We are both shocked by how little our own safety entered into our thoughts … But as researchers, our concerns were for the quality of our data” (p. 323). During our discussions, the authors were also surprised by how little the thoughts of their own safety influenced how they approached the research. At no point did we notify our department chairs or deans of these messages. Instead, we were concerned with how we could accurately present these negative comments as evidence for how to approach unexpected emotionally distressed data. Did we not consider our safety as important? Or did we not consider these credible threats and instead really just examples of online disinhibition? We are not trying to be alarmist about this—the recent rise of attacks on individuals because of political vitriol shows that there are people who will take their hatred to the extreme and actually act on their comments.

Cloud (2009) recommends taking back control of the narrative by sharing participants’ comments in public forums, such as blogs or in articles. This act of rhetorical protest creates a “pedagogy of accountability” where everyone can learn and grow in the public space. In Cloud’s case, however, she knew her harassers’ names and could engage with those individuals. Unfortunately, there is no way for us to know who most of those people are, aside from the few who provided email addresses and encouraged us to contact them to prove we actually read their comments. The anonymity or confidentiality of participants continues to be one of the gold standards of research, and it should be. However, we also need to start to consider what happens when we make ourselves so visible and work so hard to maintain participants’ confidentiality in the face of participant impropriety. In cases like this, where participants respond in an aggressive, verbally violent, and threatening manner, do participants have a moral responsibility for the safety and well-being of researchers? Based on our analysis, participants would say no. In this case, the power dynamics of the researcher–participant relationship reverses, where participants control and decide whether the researcher gets to remain safe.

Personally, some of the most disturbing insults were those questioning our professional integrity. In a time when facts and expertise is being disregarded (Nichols, 2017) and researchers are fighting for legitimacy to counter “fake news” attacks on our credibility strike at the heart of our professional identities and the work we as researchers and educators. As death and dying researchers, we vigilantly strive to maintain the highest levels of ethical consideration for our participants and in our research design. In fact, we published an essay on the complicated ethical issues one must navigate while researching issues of death and dying (Carmack & DeGroot, 2013-2014). All proper institutional review board approval was received from the researchers’ universities (exempt review), and protocol was strictly followed. We did not collect Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of participants completing the questionnaire. As mentioned earlier, DeGroot did, however, email all participants who provided their emails and noted at the end of the questionnaire that they doubted we would read their comments or would simply delete the data to meet our research goals. Comments questioning our integrity, credibility, and work are especially hurtful because they are designed to “other” us from other Americans, to make us seem like we are “not real people” (Cloud, 2009, p. 464). Unlike them, we are not hardworking, ethical, “in touch” with the world, or patriotic. These comments, designed to “own” us, underscore the distance participants may feel between themselves and academics. Instead, they paint us as “fraudulent intellectuals” (Cloud, 2009, p. 465) who do not understand the “real world” and what it is like to do “real work.” By foiling us as other in this anonymous space, we cannot get to creating or participating in a culture of accountability and civility (Cloud, 2009); instead, the anonymity reinforces the derision present in our contemporary sociopolitical landscape.

Cumulative Distress

Qualitative researchers have spent much time discussing many of the dangers related to researcher safety and well-being because of the topic of study and unexpected events that arise related to conducting research. Less talked about is the additional emotional toll of the data preparation, transcription, and analysis process, especially for nonsensitive topics. As we have stated throughout, we do not categorize this topic (election loss) as a sensitive topic, and while we did frame the study as one related to grief and loss, it is certainly not in the same vein as the work about sensitive topics such as sexual assault, miscarriage, and the death of loved ones. Regardless of how we defined the study, it did not mean that we did not experience distress from coding the data. The emotional impact of coding, known as cumulative distress (Johnson & Clarke, 2003; Woodby et al., 2011), is concerned with the emotional damage caused by the coding of emotionally sensitive and triggering qualitative data. Qualitative researchers are in a particularly vulnerable position during the coding and analysis process, be in through the repeated exposure to the data (a hallmark of qualitative analysis) or the unique nature of fully immersing oneself in the data to gain a holistic picture of participants’ comments (Patton, 2015; Woodby et al., 2011). An important distinction is needed here, however, when talking about others’ research related to cumulative distress and our study. Other articles about cumulative distress focus on how researchers’ deal with hearing about their participants’ experiences. In our case, the comments were directed at us, critiquing our work, impugning our character, and wishing death for us.

DeGroot is known to have a “tin chest and thick skin,” so the participants’ comments, broadly considered, did not affect her strongly on an emotional level. After deciding to remove irrelevant data from the initial analyses (Carmack & DeGroot, 2018; DeGroot & Carmack, in press) and the procedure for that, DeGroot was the one who went through and eliminated those comments from the document for analysis so Carmack would not have to do a deep read or analysis of them beyond the initial read-through and recognition of these comments. This “unofficial” part of the procedure was not planned; rather, it was simply understood between the two.

At the same time, we were beginning to analyze the negative comments for this manuscript, a [very] conservative media outlet picked up (and spun) our research on people’s grief following the 2016 presidential election (Airaksinen, 2018), using our research to say Clinton supporters were still mourning the loss 2 years after the election (our articles specifically point out we were focused on right after the election, not 2 years later). The article comments were eerily similar to the negative statements made by our “ineligible” participants. They also wished harm on us and questioned our motives for the study. Carmack did not read the negative comments presented in this manuscript until after the first two research articles were complete; in fact, she read them on the day the news article came out about their study (Airaksinen, 2018). She read all of the Trump supporters’ comments in one sitting, experiencing the enormity of the rage and hate directed at her and DeGroot. Although DeGroot did warn Carmack that many of the comments were highly inflammatory, she did not anticipate comments about killing herself. After reading them, she was emotionally exhausted and, coupled with the unnerving remarks from the news article, was worried about people who were writing these kinds of comments contacting them or showing up at their offices. As qualitative researchers, we understand that “some level of emotion work” is needed when making sense of qualitative data (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009, p. 68). This has been a guiding motto for us, especially in our study of death, grief, and loss, and we have developed our own coping strategies for dealing with the emotional impact of our research. We believe this helped us make sense of and actually analyze the negative comments. This experience highlights the importance of maintaining vigilance in thinking about and engaging in research emotion work. It would be easy to assume that because we were studying a nonsensitive topic, we did not need to do any emotion work. However, all of this reminds us that we need to spend more time during study design to consider ourselves as researchers just as much as we consider participants (Lofland & Lofland, 1995).

Final Considerations

Research investigating anything even remotely controversial has the potential to bring about similar participant responses. This might include topics such as vaccinations, gun control, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues, and we discovered Presidential election loss. We do not have answers regarding what procedures should be instituted to avoid precarious situations such as the one we experienced. There is an inherent assumption that our participants enter into the research base as ethical people, and this piece problematizes what happens when they do not. We aim to draw attention to this particular research complication and initiate a dialogue regarding this aspect of researcher safety. We recommend, however, that qualitative researchers spend more time talking about researcher safety (not just emotional well-being when studying sensitive topics) and how to handle these types of unexpected events. We echo Harmer and Lumsden’s (2019a) call for further research on online othering, particularly as it pertains to researchers. Although other scholars recommend that researchers try to anticipate, plan, and be prepared for these types of unexpected events, there is no way to do that with every topic. What we can do, however, is ensure that we are engaging in highly ethical research, understand the intricacies of qualitative research, and have a support system in place to help us deal with the emotional impact of participant comments. As qualitative researchers and educators who direct students’ qualitative studies, theses, and dissertations, it is important for us to start including safety as a vital part of qualitative design, not just something to be concerned with at the end.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jocelyn M. DeGroot

Author Biographies

Jocelyn M. DeGroot, PhD, Ohio University, is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research interests focus on computer-mediated communication and communicative issues of death and dying.

Heather J. Carmack, PhD, Ohio University, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research interests including communication about patient safety and communication about death and dying.

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