ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce students to the myriad ways in which researching sensitive topics may affect researchers, and to bring attention to strategies used by researchers to negotiate these challenges. It deals with some suggestions for improving the well-being of researchers when working with difficult topics in the field. Transitional justice research involves critical examination of difficult topics that can raise ethical and methodological issues for researchers. Researchers of transitional justice processes often must pay close attention to painful human experiences and listen to stories of intense suffering and injustice which may personally affect them. Tsai argues that political sensitivity is always a challenge for the researcher doing fieldwork in non-democratic and transitional systems, especially when doing surveys and quantitative research. The researchers struggled as to whether their questions could harm people by asking them to recount traumatic events, and whether participants answering questions on sensitive subjects were being endangered.
