Bearing witness to witnesses: developing the vicarious trauma reflexive sequence (VTRS) for emotionally demanding fieldwork

Abstract

Purpose: This paper explores the emotional impact of conducting qualitative interviews with UK military veterans who testified to the International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It shifts from the participants' narratives to focus on the researcher's embodied experience of vicarious trauma (VT), offering a reflexive and theoretical response to the affective demands of field work in emotionally charged contexts.

Design/methodology/approach: Using a reflexive autoethnographic approach, the study draws on two in-depth interviews and the researcher’s own emotional and somatic responses to trauma-laden testimony. The paper introduces the Vicarious Trauma Reflexive Sequence (VTRS), a six-stage conceptual model developed from the author's experiential narrative and contextualised within the literature on emotional labour, trauma-informed research and reflexivity.

Findings: The VTRS charts the researcher's journey through emotional exposure, vulnerability, disruption, reflexive processing, integration and eventual resilience. The model provides a structured lens for understanding how trauma is internalised by researchers and offers insight into the rituals, memory triggers and coping strategies that support emotional recovery. It demonstrates that VT, when critically reflected upon, can function as a site of methodological insight and knowledge production.

Originality/value: This paper contributes a novel conceptual framework that bridges autoethnographic experience with organisational and methodological theory. The VTRS offers a practical tool for trauma-informed supervision, researcher training and institutional ethics review, while challenging prevailing norms of stoicism and emotional silence in qualitative organisational research.