Session Information
Contribution
The goal of this presentation is to show that researcher’s emotions can be indispensable tools for gathering and analyzing data in ethnographic methods.
This paper is a part of my doctoral research, in which I study the conflicted situation between a northern Finnish village and school. My doctoral research is a part of a wider multidisciplinary research project, Life in Place, funded by academy of Finland, studying the wellbeing in Northern Finland.
There has been a reflexive turn in research methodology during the past couple of decades. According to Hochschild (1983, 17) emotion is a sense, like hearing or sight, crucially linked to cognition and action. Emotionally sensed knowledge is an indispensable part of the research process and experience. Researchers need to become more practiced in recognizing and interpreting emotion, just as they become more practiced in making sense of respondents’ words and action (Hubbard et al 2000, Wilkins 1993).
Not only may unconfronted emotions disturb data gathering and analysis, but confronted emotions may assist it. Emotions may be indicative of the existing body of emotions interplaying in the field. There may be silenced issues and tacit knowledge, to which the researcher has no access to when counting on verbal expression. I claim the researcher can recognize these silenced issues through their own emotions, which may be very revealing. Researcher’s management of their own emotions also helps in being properly sensitive when encountering such issues.
I adapt the psychoanalysts’ use of concepts of transference and countertransference. According to Walkerdine et al “psychoanalysts understand these emotions, when experienced as those of the analyst rather than the patient, as sometimes indicating the presence of emotions which have to be projected outwards by the patient onto the analyst because they are too painful or difficult to be experienced by the patient.” Researcher is not a therapist, and the concepts do not transfer from therapy context to research context directly. However, in research with close interaction with participants, there are situations in which the researcher experiences irrational emotions which are transferred to them from the participants.
With an example I show how my own irrational acts suggested there were emotions I wasn’t confronting, and how confronting these emotions allowed me to recognize the interactional emotional patterns of which my emotions were a part of.
Also, when dealing with children, there was knowledge to which I had no access through rational ways. There were situations which I felt were deeply meaningful but which I found I couldn’t analyze until I used my own emotions in these situations as tools.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Hochschild, A.R. 1983. The Managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkley, CA: University of California press. Hubbard, G., Backett-Milburn, K. & Kemmer, D. 2001. Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in a fieldwork and teamwork. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4, 119-137. Stacey, J. 1988. Can there be a feminist ethnography?. Womes’s Studies International Forum, 12. 579-592. Cotterill 1992. Interviewing women: Issues of Friendship, vulnerability and power. Women’s studies International Forum, 15, 593-606. Duncombe, J. and Jessop, J. 2002. ‘Doing rapport’ and the ethics of ‘Faking Friendship’. In M. Mautner, M. Birch, J. Jessop & T. Miller (Eds.) Ethics in Qualitative research (107-122) London: Sage Heikkinen, H.L.T. 2002. Whatever is Narrative Research? In Huttunen, R., Heikkinen, H.L.T., Syrjälä, L. (Eds.) Narrative Research, Voices of Teachers and Philosophers. SoPhi. Jyväskylä University.
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