The data for this research was collected in two phases: through an online survey and through in-depth interviews.
Online survey
The online survey mapped the experiences of journalists, human rights and humanitarian professionals working with eyewitness media content. The survey was fully confidential and did not request or record the names of respondents or the organisations for which they work.
The survey was widely disseminated to managers at news, human rights and humanitarian organisations which were known to be using eyewitness media content in their work. Managers then distributed the survey to their staff. We also publicised the survey through Eyewitness Media Hub’s Medium page and it was widely disseminated through social media networks. Several respondents approached us directly having viewed information about our research and they were provided with the link to the survey. We purposely designed the survey in a manner that would ensure that we could not correlate those who had contacted us with their survey responses.
We launched the survey on 1 July 2015 and it was closed on 1 September 2015. In total, we received 209 useable responses. We had hoped to receive 100 responses from journalists and a 100 from human rights and humanitarian professionals. Upon closing the survey we had received 122 responses from journalists and 87 from human rights and humanitarian professionals.
23 percent of respondents were located in the United Kingdom and 15 percent in the United States of America. We also received responses from professionals located in 46 different countries: Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Burma, Burundi, Canada, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kosovo, Liberia, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, Pakistan, Palestinian, Poland, Republic of the Philippines, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Ukraine.
The survey was designed to map the respondent’s frequency of engagement with eyewitness media content in their daily workday. Survey responses revealed the amount of traumatic or distressing eyewitness media professionals are exposed to. The survey gauged levels of pre- engagement and ongoing training and the specific types of training that respondents found useful. It further mapped the availability of counselling services and other support mechanisms within the respondent’s organisations. The correlated survey responses are referenced throughout this report.
Importantly, the first survey question asked respondents to indicate whether they work with eyewitness media. If the response was negative, the respondent was not able to complete the survey and their entry was discounted from the results. It should be underlined, therefore, that our survey responses cannot and should not be used to make generalisations about vicarious trauma across the three professional sectors examined. By automatically including only those professionals that work with eyewitness media we guaranteed an important degree of specificity.
Interviews
After the online survey was closed and the results were analysed, we conducted in-depth interviews with both senior managers and desk workers. Interview participants either volunteered to take part in the survey by indicating that they were prepared to be interviewed at the end of the survey (this was anonymised, so no link could be made between the interview participant and their survey responses). In addition, several individuals were approached by the research team because either they or their organisations were known to be heavy users of eyewitness media content or leading organisations in one of the sectors under investigation. A number of interviews were conducted during a week-long research trip to London where many news organisations are headquartered. Face to face interviews were also conducted during the Online News Association conference in Los Angeles in September 2015. The majority of interviews were, however, conducted over Skype.
When designing the study, our initial goal was to conduct 60 interviews. In reality, it became apparent that the many respondents were providing similar answers. A decision was then made to reduce the number of interviews as we had reached what Glaser and Strauss call “theoretical saturation.16 In the end we conducted 38 in-depth interviews.
The in-depth interviews enabled us to elucidate the most important themes that emerged from the quantitative survey and our literature review. The goal of these interviews was to explore personal experiences of vicarious trauma with particular focus upon specific support, or lack thereof, that participants receive from their organisations, even where the interviewee told us that they were not displaying symptoms of vicarious trauma. Our interviews also helped us to understand the level of awareness of vicarious trauma within the industry within which they work. This enables us to draw important comparisons between professions.
As with the survey, our objective was not to generalise about all journalists or all human rights and humanitarian professionals. Rather, our objective was to understand how individuals frequently working with eyewitness media content are impacted; if they feel they have been traumatised and the extent to which their organisations were, or were not, providing them with support. We found that both the respondents to our survey and those people who we interviewed were viewing a large amount of distressing images through eyewitness media. Furthermore, we found that there is a large disconnect between professionals who frequently work with eyewitness media and their managers. While not all professionals are experiencing vicarious trauma, the majority who responded to our survey are.
In the worst cases, professionals have been signed off sick for stress-related illness or they have had to resign from their positions because they are simply unable to take any more horror. Finally, we looked at how universities and organisations address teaching and training around vicarious trauma. We conclude that universities are failing to teach journalism or human rights students that they are likely to view traumatic eyewitness media in their careers and that organisations are largely, with some notable exceptions, failing to give their staff the resources they need to counteract the impact of viewing distressing eyewitness media content on a regular basis.