The Emotional Work of Doing eHealth Research
Maria Klara Wolters, Zawadhafsa Mkulo, Petra Boynton · 2017
Within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), researchers have become more aware of the interplay between the work they are doing and their own health and wellbeing. These issues have been discussed mostly in the context of HCI research around sensitive issues (Sensitive HCI). We argue that researcher wellbeing needs to be considered in all eHealth and mHealth research. Here, we focus on the emotional labour required by the political and organisational structures of eHealth research, and illustrate it with autoethnographic observations from two research studies, a trial of an eMentalHealth intervention, and an evaluation of a health insurance scheme in Tanzania. Based on a review of relevant literature from health and social care research, we suggest a process for supporting emotional work that can be adapted to other application contexts.