When evaluators and researchers think about participant wellbeing, the conversation often starts with consent forms and ends with a list of helpline numbers at the bottom of the information sheet. Distress protocols deserve considerably more thought than that. A well-designed distress protocol is not a bureaucratic formality. It is an active planning tool that shapes how a project is designed, how fieldwork is conducted, and how your team responds when a participant needs support.
This article explains what a distress protocol is, why it is useful even in projects with modest risk profiles, what a good one contains, and how to ensure your team is genuinely equipped to use it. A downloadable template is available at the end of this article.
What is a distress protocol?
A distress protocol is a documented plan for how your team will recognise, respond to, and follow up on participant distress during data collection. It typically covers the steps a fieldworker should take if a participant shows signs of distress during an interview or focus group, what to do if a participant makes a disclosure, how to wrap up an activity in a way that leaves participants feeling supported, and what support is available to team members after a difficult session.
Distress protocols are sometimes described as something only sensitive research needs. That framing misses the point. The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2025 (National Statement) is clear that where participant reactions have the potential to exceed discomfort and become distress, this should be treated as potential for harm. The National Statement also explicitly recognises that predicting which topics will lead to distress is not always easy, and that developing clear protocols for managing distress is an important part of research planning.
Development of clear protocols for managing any distress that might be experienced by participants during data collection is an important component of planning research. Predicting what topics are likely to lead to distress, and how to manage it, will not always be easy.
That last point matters. Emotional triggers are not always predictable from project design alone. A survey about household energy use might brush up against financial stress or housing insecurity. A program evaluation focused on employment services might surface experiences of discrimination or mental ill-health. Distress can arise in contexts that look, on paper, like low-risk projects.
Why use a distress protocol for lower-risk projects?
There is a persistent tendency in evaluation/research practice to treat distress protocols as something that only high-risk projects need. This reflects a misunderstanding of how risk works in human research.
The National Statement identifies psychological harm as a recognised category of harm in research. This includes feelings of distress, guilt, anger, or fear arising from, for example, disclosure of sensitive information or an experience of re-traumatisation. Crucially, the National Statement also recognises that some participants may be at higher risk of harm or discomfort than others in the same project, arising from the interaction between project design, the topics covered, and participants' own circumstances.
Some participants may be at higher risk of harm or discomfort than others in the same project. Increased risk can arise from the nature and design of the research, from specific attributes or circumstances of individual participants, or from the interaction between these factors.
This means a project that is genuinely low risk for most participants may not be low risk for all of them. A telephone survey of community members about local service access might be unremarkable for most respondents. For a participant currently experiencing family violence or housing instability, the same questions may land very differently.
A distress protocol does two things in this situation. First, it gives your fieldworkers a plan to follow rather than having to improvise in a moment that is already stressful. Second, it demonstrates to an ethics review body that you have thought carefully about the realistic range of participant experience, not just the median case.
There is also a practical dimension that applies well beyond ethics review. Jo van Twest Farmer, a policy and evaluation consultant whose practice focuses on trauma-informed evaluation, has observed that traditional distress protocols are often written from a perspective that emphasises participant vulnerability and seeks to minimise distress exposure. The unintended consequence, she argues, is that this well-intentioned approach can strip participants of their rights and autonomy to take part in a way that works for them. A better approach puts the onus on the evaluator or researcher to create a safe environment, one where participants can express their emotions without being silenced in the name of protection.
"What [a purely protective approach] misses is that the onus should be on the evaluator to create a safe environment, one where participants can be free to express their emotions how they need to."
- Jo Farmer, Trauma-informed evaluation: Safety protocol (2025)
This reframing is significant. The goal of a distress protocol is not to prevent all discomfort. Sometimes discomfort is an entirely appropriate human response to discussing difficult topics. The goal is to ensure that your project does not compound or exacerbate distress, and that participants leave feeling safe, supported, and that their time was worthwhile.
What a good distress protocol contains
A well-constructed distress protocol moves through four phases:
- Setting up for safety;
- Identifying distress;
- Responding to distress and disclosures; and
- Wrapping up.
Each phase involves specific actions that can be planned in advance.
Setting up for safety
Good practice begins before the fieldwork activity itself. Participants should receive clear, plain-language information about what the activity will involve, how long it will take, who else will be present, and what topics will be discussed. This is not just about informed consent in the formal sense. It gives participants the information they need to prepare themselves and make genuine choices about how they engage.
Building choices into the design of the evaluation/research activity supports this further. Offering participants options about interview format (phone or in person), interview location, or how they can indicate they would like to skip a question or take a break all serve to preserve participant autonomy. A well-designed activity makes exercising the right to withdraw or pause feel genuinely low-cost.
Accessibility also falls within this phase. Consider whether your venues, materials, and communication formats are genuinely accessible to the range of people who might participate. This includes thinking about language, mobility, sensory needs, and whether the timing or location of an activity imposes unreasonable practical barriers.
A practical step that is easy to overlook: ask participants to nominate a trusted contact before the activity begins. This is someone who knows them well and can be reached if support is needed during or after the session.
Identifying distress
Distress takes different forms, and fieldworkers need to be able to recognise them. Signs of hyperarousal, the fight-or-flight response, include crying, shaking, breathlessness, voice changes, or irritability. Signs of hypoarousal, the freeze or fawn response, include dissociation, disorientation, difficulty answering questions, or very brief responses where fuller answers might be expected. A participant repeatedly asking to leave the room may also be communicating distress non-verbally.
Two things are equally important to keep in mind here. Just because a participant is showing one or more of these signs does not necessarily mean they are distressed. And just because a participant appears calm does not mean they are not. The fieldworker's role is to notice, check in, and be guided by the participant, not to make assumptions.
Fieldworkers should also be encouraged to reflect on their own responses. If a topic or situation is generating a strong emotional response in the interviewer, this can affect the participant's experience too. Team members who understand their own triggers are better placed to manage them.
Responding to distress and disclosures
When a participant appears distressed, the first step is to pause the activity and check in. A simple, non-intrusive prompt is usually the right approach. Something like "I've noticed this might be a difficult topic. How are you going?" gives the participant the opportunity to respond without feeling put on the spot.
The key principle in responding is to offer rather than act. Ask whether the participant would like a glass of water, rather than bringing one without asking. Ask whether they would like to continue, take a break, or stop, rather than deciding on their behalf. The National Statement requires that where there are signs of reluctance or distress, the researcher must consider pausing and exploring what is needed before proceeding.
If the participant remains distressed after checking in and offering options, it is appropriate to conclude the activity. This means linking the participant to their trusted contact, providing information about relevant support options, and ensuring they do not leave without some form of follow-up in place.
Disclosures require careful handling. Depending on your project context and jurisdiction, you may have mandatory reporting obligations. Your protocol should set these out specifically, rather than relying on a vague statement like "I will tell someone if I think you are at risk." What triggers a reporting obligation? Who do you report to? These specifics need to be documented, communicated to participants in advance as part of the confidentiality information they receive, and understood by every member of the fieldwork team.
Wrapping up
How an activity ends matters as much as how it begins. At the conclusion, take a moment to ask the participant if there is anything else they need. Without being patronising, it can help to briefly acknowledge that the discussion covered significant ground and to normalise the idea of doing something restorative afterwards. Some evaluators and researchers find it natural to mention what they personally do to decompress after a difficult session, as a way of modelling self-care without instructing participants.
Check in with team members after the activity too. Secondary or vicarious trauma is a real occupational risk for those conducting evaluation/research on sensitive topics, and a distress protocol should include some provision for team wellbeing, not only participant wellbeing.
Making sure your team can actually use it
A distress protocol that sits in a project folder and is never discussed is not a safety plan. It is a document.
Effective implementation requires that everyone involved in data collection has read and understood the protocol before fieldwork begins. For projects involving in-depth interviews or focus groups, this should include a discussion of specific scenarios. What will you do if a participant becomes tearful? What if someone discloses that they are currently experiencing violence? What if you yourself feel overwhelmed during an interview? Running through these scenarios in advance, including practising specific phrases out loud, significantly improves the likelihood that team members will respond calmly and appropriately in the moment.
For focus groups, the protocol needs to reflect the group context specifically. Distress in a group setting affects not only the individual concerned but the whole room. Having two facilitators, establishing group norms at the outset, preparing a breakout space, and knowing in advance how you will re-engage the group after a difficult moment are all worth planning explicitly.
For online data collection, different technical provisions apply, including setting up a private messaging channel between facilitators, establishing a breakout room, and having a clear plan for what happens if a participant leaves the session unexpectedly.
Team members should also know where to go for support after a difficult session. This might be a debrief with a supervisor, access to an employee assistance programme, or a standing agreement within the team to check in after any session that involved significant distress. These arrangements should be named in the protocol and confirmed as in place before fieldwork starts.
A note on support options
The most common approach to participant support in evaluation/research is to append a list of helpline numbers to the information sheet. This practice is better than nothing, but it has real limitations. Many people with lived experience of mental ill-health or trauma will already have access to this information, and some will have had poor experiences with the services listed.
Where possible, work with participants to identify support options that are relevant to their own circumstances. This might include community-specific resources, such as Aboriginal yarning lines or peer-led services, rather than generic national helplines. If your project includes a peer worker or lived-experience consultant, consider whether they can be available to participants following the activity. Be careful, too, about the reflex to refer participants back to the program under evaluation as their primary support option. For participants who have had difficult experiences with that service, this may be unhelpful or actively harmful.
For ethics review bodies
Ethics committees reviewing applications that include a distress protocol should look for specificity. A generic statement that "distress will be managed appropriately" does not satisfy the requirement for a documented plan. A good protocol names the specific steps the team will take, the specific support options available to participants, and the specific arrangements for team wellbeing. It should also reflect the particular context of the project, including the population, the topics, and the setting.
The National Statement requires that the mitigation strategies proposed for managing risk, including psychological risk, be adequate to the risks identified in the project. A distress protocol is one of the key mechanisms through which that requirement is met in qualitative and mixed-methods evaluation/research. Committees that receive a well-constructed protocol are better placed to assess whether adequate planning has occurred. Committees that receive only a helpline number are not.
Download the template
A distress protocol template for Australian evaluation/research contexts is available to download. All project-specific fields are clearly flagged so you can adapt it to your project before fieldwork begins or before submitting it as part of an ethics application.
Download: Distress Protocol Template (.docx)
This article draws on the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2025) and on the trauma-informed evaluation framework developed by Jo Farmer of Jo Farmer Consulting. Her safety protocol for trauma-informed evaluation (Farmer, 2025) provided important practical grounding for the guidance in this article. Her work is available at www.jofarmer.com. This article is intended as practical guidance and does not constitute legal advice. If you have questions about whether your project requires ethics review, get in touch.
AI Disclosure: Initial drafts of the content for this article were prepared using Large Language Models with input from Iris Ethics staff who guided the scope and design. Subsequent revisions and final versions were developed and approved by Iris Ethics staff.