© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com doi:10.1093/iwc/iww010 From Empathy to Care: A Feminist Care Ethics Perspective on Long-Term Researcher–Participant Relations AUSTIN TOOMBS * ,SHAD GROSS,SHAOWEN BARDZELL AND JEFFREY BARDZELL School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, 919 E 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47408, USA * Corresponding author: altoombs@indiana.edu Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human parti- cipants necessarily includes care, both from researchers and participants. These caring relation- ships are frequently left unaddressed in research reporting, disguising the fact that researchers are also cared for in their interactions with participants. In this paper, we demonstrate how a care ethics perspective helps to bring clarity to the care entanglements that pervade the relationships that develop between researchers and participants. This perspective not only leads to a more complete ability to disclose the position of the researcher in their data, but also provides insights into how we describe the empathic character of these relationships. We analyze the researcher– participant relationships we developed during two separate long-term research engagements—a 19-month ethnography and a 6-month design deployment—using a care ethics perspective. We discuss how researchers and participants navigate a complex set of roles and reflexively engage with interpersonal vulnerabilities and needs for care. We argue that researchers, particularly those who participate in long-term qualitative studies, have to engage authentically with the multiple sub- ject positions they themselves occupy, as well as the multiple subject positions in which their research participants become entangled. This importantly includes researchers’ positions as individuals with human and social needs who participate in reciprocal, caring relationships with their partici- pants. We argue that HCI research can benefit from incorporating a care ethics perspective, par- ticularly in adopting the goals of developing empathic relationships with participants, acknowledging the reflexivity of research and engaging in researcher self-disclosure. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • Research participants and researchers perform care for each other throughout the research process. • This is demonstrated through two long-term research engagements and a care ethics analysis of the relationships that developed between researchers and participants within them. • This care ethics perspective enables a more complete form of researcher self-disclosure, and is helpful when attempting to develop an understanding of empathic relationships with participants. Keywords: researcher–participant relationships; empathy; care ethics; feminist HCI Editorial Board Member: Dr. EDR Editors Received 10 May 2015; Revised 29 February 2016; Accepted 21 March 2016 1. INTRODUCTION The human–computer interaction (HCI) research community is increasingly engaging with matters of social change that go beyond the immediate qualities of interaction, exemplified by recent efforts in ubiquitous computing, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), value sensitive design, sustainable interaction design, and par- ticipatory design, among others. In doing so, HCI researchers INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS, 2016 Interacting with Computers Advance Access published May 4, 2016 by guest on May 16, 2016 http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from