The Politics of Conducting Research in Africa by Lyn Johnstone

Author:Lyn Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319955315
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Consequences and Conclusions

I spent just about six weeks in the refugee camps in South Sudan . This was not a particularly prolonged period, but it was long enough to develop the urgently felt need to create distance between myself and the stories that the refugees told me. This distance was achieved in some way in my subsequent decision to apply techniques of quantification to the data that I had collected. Counting the responses that my interviewees gave around the issue of radio programming and effectively blending out everything else made handling the data much easier.

Based on this experience, in this chapter, I argued three intertwined points with regards to the importance of emotions in research. First, emotions are frowned upon in traditional research. They are understood as tainting data and thus thought to weaken research findings. To avoid this, researchers are expected to hold back their emotions and display an objective state of mind toward their participants. This, and this is my second point, turns research into an emotional labor . The importance of this concept for researchers has only recently been acknowledged in the literature on fieldwork, and mostly in the fields of health-related research with a feminist perspective. In this literature, the effects that conducting emotionally draining research can have on the researcher have been clearly described. However, as the number of novice researchers that conduct fieldwork in emotional demanding and potentially dangerous settings is on the rise in the field of International Relations, the importance of acknowledging emotions and their possible effects seems increasingly important for International Relations departments where doctoral research students are preparing for the field.

This brings me to my third point. Not only is it important to acknowledge emotions in the field for the researcher’s well-being , but it is important for research results, also. Contrary to the idea that emotions weaken results by adding elements of a researcher’s personality, it might be argued that they, in fact, strengthen results too. Emotions are part of the researcher’s positionality. Other than a researcher’s class, gender or ethnicity emotions make for a more fluid part of identity. Still, this makes them no less powerful, up to the point where they can change a research design, as they did when I was in South Sudan , where I switched to quantification solely because of the emotions I was experiencing.

While there is nothing wrong with choosing a quantitative method , the reasons behind method choice need to be acknowledged because specific methods provide particular answers. Based on the answers I got from the interviews I conducted, my final recommendations for the radio program included both a school program and a storytelling program. If I had only carried out a questionnaire, I probably would not have included these two elements, simply because I did not think about them. For the refugees I talked to, these two programs were meaningful and important. On the other hand, if a survey had been planned from the beginning it would have perhaps been more representative.

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