According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 61% of men and 51% of women in the US experience at least one-lifetime trauma. Correspondingly, practitioners increasingly recognize the need for a trauma-informed approach to providing care. However, a trauma-informed perspective has not been widely incorporated into public health research. According to SAMHSA, trauma-informed care approaches should realize the impact of trauma, recognize and respond to signs and symptoms of trauma in all aspects of practice, and avoid retraumatization. It is not clear how these approaches apply to research and whether public health researchers can adopt them as is or need research-specific guidelines. With the widespread increase in trauma research and interest in populations who have experienced trauma, developing a trauma-informed approach to conducting public health research is important for conducting and disseminating ethical, relevant research on and with traumatized populations.

To address this gap, an interdisciplinary team undertook a systematic review to identify, describe and summarize guidelines for conducting public health-relevant research with traumatized populations. We searched literature from 1978, when the Belmont Report was issued, onwards. Our key questions were: what are existing recommendations for conducting trauma-informed research with traumatized populations; and, what gaps exist for public health practitioners to be able to plan and implement trauma-informed research studies. We systematically searched four peer-reviewed databases and well as gray literature, resulting in 6,234 references for screening by two independent reviewers. This resulted in 175 reviews. We conducted a narrative synthesis of existing guidelines and recommendations from these full-text reviews. We summarized these existing guidelines and compared them to the Belmont Report’s topics of autonomy, beneficence, and justice. Results of this review will contribute to the dissemination of trauma-informed research guidelines to be incorporated into public health research.