Emotion and the Researcher by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781567203646
Goodreads: 2259202
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2000-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

INTERPRETING EMOTIONS

We have suggested that gaining ‘emotionally sensed knowledge’ during the interview itself is not straightforward. These challenges crystallise when the researcher sits down with the transcripts, recordings and other data and begins to interpret. However, having time to reflect on what was said and unsaid and to separate words and bodily signals can also suggest new understandings or questions. As we have intimated, this is particularly challenging when working within another culture, or where the participant’s first language differs from that of the interviewer. We focus here on two important difficulties of interpretation. The first stems from how the emotions – fears, hopes and beliefs – of the interviewee influence their answers and the second is about the difficulties of identifying and understanding the interviewee’s emotions.

A key concern in any research is understanding how the participant’s emotions may influence their answers. Making emotional sense of people’s stories also involves seeing the question from their perspective, including how much they want to disclose, whether they are willing to ‘open themselves up’ and show their vulnerabilities, and whether they are saying what they think the researcher wants to hear. People may also refrain from raising experiences they judge will be of little significance to the researcher. The young Zambians often challenged why their lives would interest someone from the UK. Some in Swindon said they were ‘not worth’ interviewing. In both places, we often had to assert that the ‘mundane’ is interesting and the participant’s voice important and of significance to the research.

In Zambia, few of the young caregivers said they received help from family, friends or organisations with their caring responsibilities, despite visible evidence to the contrary. While this could partly have been a rapport issue, reflecting Caroline’s position as a possibly untrustworthy ‘outsider’, it was also suggested to Caroline that this was done in the hope that she would support them and their families. While this might be thought simple ‘misinformation’ for personal gain, its significance is far greater. It provides a glimpse of the precarious lives these young people lead, their hopes of ‘rescue’ and their difficulties in negotiating the complex systems of ‘development’ research and aid.

The Swindon interviewees did not expect material help but did sometimes want social approval or reassurance. After reading the transcripts, looking at their personal community ‘maps’ and ruminating on the ‘feel’ of the encounter, we thought that their beliefs about how relationships with family members and friends ‘ought’ to be sometimes affected what they told us. This might be by exaggerating the closeness of a bond or the frequency of contact, skating over tensions in a relationship or leaving out valuable information about a relationship. Again, such ‘misinformation’ can provide information of another kind – here concerning beliefs about friendship and family – but we remain uncertain about how well we detected such influences. These uncertainties of interpretation relate to and question our ability to understand the emotional meaning of aspects of an interview like hesitancies, uneasiness, fervour and enthusiasm in our respondents’ accounts.

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