Pain(ful) research: Hyperembodiment and the value of lived experience of pain in qualitative research

Qualitative research methods play a central role in pain and health research, especially in enhancing understandings of lived experiences. This article focuses on the experiences of a researcher living with a chronic pain condition completing in-depth qualitative interviews exploring knee pain and osteoarthritis experiences, treatment and management. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, the article considers how the lived experience of the researcher (i.e. I), as a person living with pain and (dis)ability, impacted the research process. To do so, the research team (i.e. we) critically reflect on three important moments in interviews with participants and introduce the notion of hyperembodiment to explore responses that the research process elicited for the researcher. We advocate for hyperembodied reflexive approaches in qualitative research and outline the importance of researcher-centred ethics-of-care frameworks more broadly in health research, and especially in studies involving people with lived experiences of health conditions as researchers.