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Bowlby and Wouango in this special issue). What has been published tends to be highly personal and reflexive, pointing to the emotional labour involved in undertaking a project dealing with mortality and with many offering ‘confessional’ style narratives about what was experienced in the field. Several authors also point to the fallibility of their pre-fieldwork ‘preparations’ (Rowling, 1999; Visser, 2016; Woodthorpe, 2007, 2009) and make recommendations regarding how to better support researchers undertaking future death-related research. They consider various reflexive practices, ‘emotional safety protocols’ (Bowtell, Sawyer, Aroni, Green, & Duncan, 2013) and aspects of self-care management (Rager, 2005), such as keeping a diary (Howarth, 1993; Valentine, 2007), scheduling plenty of time between interviews (Rowling, 1999), and taking part in regular debriefing opportunities (Rolls & Relf, 2006). However, as Visser (2016) notes, there is probably a limit to which one can ever be prepared for such work. She also adds that debriefing in particular can have implications for participants’ anonymity and confidentiality, and that such ‘off-loading’ opportunities are often managed in an ad hoc manner (whilst many authors attest to the need for more formalised arrangements). Therefore, in the spirit of cultivating a community of support, some scholars have called for greater transparency in research accounts and a more nuanced understanding of how the researcher’s own emotions become an integral part of analytical processes and knowledge production (Rolls & Relf, 2006; Valentine, 2007; Woodthorpe, 2007 see also Brennan and Letherby in this special issue), as well as inform their ethical sensibilities (Boden et al., 2016). They argue for less filtering out of the researcher self (Valentine, 2007) and to make personal experience a central tenet in reporting research; or as Visser (2016) has put it, ‘to take ‘the emotional’ out of the margins’ of our project outputs (p. 6). Some of the issues these writers discuss have clear resonance with more generic publications about the emotional nature of conducting sensitive (qualitative) research on a range of topics, where effects on the researcher and the importance of reflexivity are now more readily acknowledged (Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2009; Johnson & Clarke, 2003; Rager, 2005). However, in the aforementioned accounts a number of issues that relate particularly to death studies have been identified. As Woodthorpe (2011) has argued, ‘death is more than’ a sensitive subject – ‘[e]veryone is an “insider” when it comes to death’ due to its ‘universal reach’ (p. 100). Thus, unlike when researching many other ‘sensitive issues’ such as domestic abuse or criminality, death researchers will be attending to matters they too shall experience personally at some point in their lives (Rowling, 1999) and so encounter an inevitable blurring of the perceived or intended boundaries between researcher and self (Woodthorpe, 2011). Their work can resonate with personal losses and exacerbate feelings of grief, and also prompt pertinent questions about professional roles and how researchers ‘should’ feel when their participants die (Visser, 2016) – including deliberations about ‘appropriate’ courses of action to take with implications for researchers and ethics committees (e.g. sending condolence cards, see Bowtell et al., 2013). Researching end-of-life issues can also provoke more general anxieties about mortality and the ‘fragility of life’ (McKenzie et al., 2016), such as anticipating the death of loved ones (Woodthorpe, 2007) as well as feelings of despondency (Lawton, 2000) and helplessness (see Burles in this special issue). Some suggest that less experienced (Woodthorpe, 2009) and non-clinically trained researchers (McKenzie et al., 2016) in particular, may experience negative and challenging feelings. Moreover, McKenzie et al. (2016) warn not to focus exclusively on support for researchers involved in interview-type encounters, for indirect engagement with ‘participants’ – such as when examining documents, case files and clinical notes – can also expose researchers to difficult, stressful and emotional content (see also Fincham, Scourfield, & Langer, 2008 and Scott Bray in this special issue).Given the aforementioned issues, it is significant that Kendall et al. (2007) report that research managers in end-of-life care are concerned about factors that shape research environments – specifically the lack of career structure for researchers – and make it difficult to retain skilled personnel that are most appropriately equipped to work in this complex field. Indeed, researchers working in palliative and end-of-life care have drawn attention to particular challenges that they face when undertaking research which involves dying people (Gysels et al., 2013; Seymour et al., 2005). Although more candid insight is still needed, it seems that relatively, this sub-field of death-related research has a more established dialogue regarding methodological issues (for instance, Addington-Hall, Bruera, Higginson, & Payne’s, 2007 volume devoted to methods).1 In particular, end of life care researchers have deliberated whether it is ‘fair’ to ask dying people to take part in research (Barnett, 2001) – including children and young people (Downing, 2016) – considering the potential for this to be burdensome (Milne &
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