Int. J.

Social Research Methodology

Vol. 10, No. 3, July 2007, pp. 195209
ISSN 13645579 (print)/ISSN 14645300 (online) 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13645570701541894
Emotions and Research
Janet Holland
Taylor and Francis TSRM_A_254050.sgm
Received 10 August 2005; Accepted 14 March 2006
10.1080/13645570701541894 International Journal of Social Research Methodology 1364-5579 (print)/1464-5300 (online) Original Article 2007 Taylor & Francis 00 00000002007 Professor JanetHolland hollanj@lsbu.ac.uk
This article discusses emotions and research from a number of perspectives to unearth the
ways that emotions are implicated in the research process. The emergence of the Sociology
of the Emotions urges rethinking of the relation between knowledge and emotion, arguing
that emotion is necessary for knowledge. We discuss memory work in a study of emotion,
and the psychosocial approach of Walkerdine and her colleagues, concerned with their own
subjectivity in the research process and emotion and unconscious processes. Ethical issues
raised by feminists in the case of women establishing rapport in researching women are
considered, as is the emotion work demanded by particularly qualitative research. Some
examples from researchers field experiences and potential solutions to the pains of
emotions and emotion work in the field are given. The argument is made that emotions are
important in the production of knowledge and add power in understanding, analysis and
interpretation.
Introduction
Connecting emotions and research might seem almost as anomalous as linking
emotions and science. Yet who can deny that the motivation for a scientist is the desire
for and joy in discovery. Feuer sees emotion at the root of the scientific revolution:
The scientist of the seventeenth century was a philosophical optimist; delight and joy in
mans status pervaded his theory of knowledge and of the universe. And it was this revolu-
tion in mans emotions that was the basis for the change in his ideas. Behind the history of
ideas lies the history of emotions. (1963, p. 1)
Janet Holland is a Professor of Social Research and Co-director of the Families and Social Capital ESRC
Research Group at London South Bank University. Her most recent books are (with Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue
Sharpe and Rachel Thomson) The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (London: Tufnell
Press, 2004); (with Jeffrey Weeks and Matthew Waites (Eds.)) Sexualities and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2003) and (with Caroline Ramazanoglu) Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices (London: Sage, 2002).
Correspondence to: Janet Holland, London South Bank University, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA, UK.
Email: hollanj@lsbu.ac.uk
196 J. Holland
Barbalet (2002) draws attention to the fact that a basic aspect of the work of
Fleck (1935) largely cited as a precursor of the Kuhnian approach to the philosophy
of science, is that he also explicitly points to the central role of emotions in these
processes (Barbalet, 2002, p. 140). And Bloch (2002) brings us down to earth with
an empirical study of emotions in Academia, identifying pride/joy, anger, shame/
embarrassment/confusion in the responses from her participants, all requiring
emotion management within the rules of engagement of the academic setting
(Hochschild, 1998).
Thinking about emotions and research links into a number of debates and discus-
sions in the social sciences, and particularly sociology and womens studies. These coil
around feminist arguments about the importance of womens experience in the
construction of knowledge and the impossibility of the Cartesian rationalist project
which set up the dualisms on which much of western thought has been basedthe
separation of mind from body, nature from culture, reason from emotion and the
public from the private. It intimates the impossibility of the detached researcher on a
scientific quest for objectivity and truth, which is based on these ideas and underpins
positivist approaches in science.
Emotions and research also draws attention to researchers experiences, particularly
in the field, and to issues of ethics that permeate all research. It calls back discussions
about feminist methodology (Ramazanoglu & Holland, 2002; Stanley & Wise, 1993),
qualitative investigation and women interviewing women, with all their complicated
intersections.
Emotions and research hooks into two broad subsets of sociology that have
emerged in recent years: the sociology of the body and the sociology of emotions
each with their own histories, theories, approaches and developed critique of what
had gone before. This article will touch on the sociology of emotionsa critique of
and insertion into the field of sociology, and will discuss a method of researching
emotions, and ways of using emotions in research at all stages, including, perhaps
particularly, in the analytic process. I will also discuss experiences of emotions in the
field and the effects that these experiences can have on researchers and research
participants.
Sociology of Emotions
The sociology of the emotions emerged in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, and
took hold in the 1990s in the UK. Exponents, while they can trace some implicit
references to the emotions in the classical writings of sociology, see the dead hand of
Cartesian dualisms lying at the core of the absence until recently of the emotions in
sociological study, and of any recognition that the emotions can contribute to an
understanding of the social. In sociology, emotions have historically been associated
with the irrational and so quite opposed to the objective scientific search for knowl-
edge. What sociologists of emotions have argued is that understanding emotions is
essential to the pursuit of knowledge, and that the relationship between them should
be rethought:
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 197
rather than repressing emotion in epistemology it is necessary to rethink the relation
between knowledge and emotion and construct conceptual models that demonstrate the
mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relations between reason and emotions. Far
from precluding the possibility of reliable knowledge, emotion as well as value must be
shown as necessary to such knowledge. (Jaggar, 1989, pp. 156157)
Sociologists of emotions consider that the study of emotions can transcend the
dichotomous ways of thinking that have restricted Western thought since they lie at the
juncture of some of these fundamental dualismsmind/body, nature/culture, public/
private (Bendelow & Williams, 1998; Williams & Bendelow, 1996a). There are differ-
ences within the field of course, not least in the theoretical perspective on what the
emotions are, which as in other subsets of sociology, varies between the biological and
the social. From the biological perspective, emotions are instinctual, or are the brains
conscious response to instinctual visceral change. The social perspective is based on a
social constructionist approach, but with variations within it including a post-modern
trend arguing for the primacy of discourse in the construction of emotions. An inter-
actionist position sits somewhere between them, or combines them (Hochschild,
1983). Hochschild, for example, sees emotion as our most important sense, but
crucially as linked both to action and to cognition. It is Hochschild who has introduced
into the field very influential concepts about the management of emotions. These
include emotion management (an effort by any means, conscious or not, to change
ones feeling or emotion), where we try to shape and reshape our feelings to fit our
inner cultural guidelines (Hochschild, 1998, p. 9). There are feeling rules which
guide our emotion work of management. She says further in managing feeling, we
partly create it. We can see the very act of managing emotion as part of what the
emotion becomes (1998, p.11). Hochschild has been particularly interested in the
commercialisation of emotion work in her studies of flight attendants and other
workers, and in gender differences. She says:
Th[e] specialisation of emotional labor in the marketplace rests on the different childhood
training of the heart that is given to girls and to boys Moreover, each specialization
presents men and women with different emotional tasks. Women are more likely to be
presented with the task of mastering anger and aggression in the service of being nice. To
men, the socially assigned task of aggressing against those that break rules of various sorts
creates the private task of mastering fear and vulnerability. (Hochschild, 1983, p. 163)
For another influential figure in the field, Denzins (1984) emotions are embodied
experiences, so that the emotions body becomes a moving, feeling complex of sensi-
ble feelings, feelings of the lived body, intentional value feelings, and feelings of the self
and moral person (1984, p. 128). So it is at the intersection between emotions as
embodied experiences, their social nature, and their links with feelings of selfhood and
personal identity reflectively experienced, that the sociological perspective on under-
standing emotions should be built.
There have been disciplinary border skirmishes between psychology, psychoanalytic
and psychotherapeutic approaches to the study of the emotions and the sociology of
emotions as to who can best understand the place of the emotions in the experience of
human beings (Craib, 1995; Duncombe & Marsden, 1993, 1996; Williams & Bendelow,
198 J. Holland
1996b. See too Parkinson, 1996 for a social psychological approach). But there is an
argument that the complexity of such an understanding is so great that a multi-
disciplinary approach is in any case more appropriate.
Williams and Bendelow map the field of sociology of emotions onto the concerns of
sociology:
emotions have fundamental implications for a range of pertinent sociological themes
and issues including social action, agency and identity; social structure; gender, sexuality
and intimacy; the embodiment of emotions across the life-course (from childhood to old
age); health and illness; and the social organisation of emotions in the workplace (formal
and informal). (1996b, pp. 145153)
Game (1997) is a dissenting voice. She is concerned with the role of emotion in the
development of human thought and fears that a sociology of emotion will merely lead
to the objectification of emotion, that emotion will become just another social
phenomenon to be studied using objective, systematic emotion-free methodologies.
For Game emotion is a way of knowing the world, emotions are the means by which
we make sense of, and relate to, our physical, natural and social world. So emotion has
epistemological significance since we can only know through our emotions and not
simply our cognition or intellect. This is a theme that underlies a number of feminist
positions and much of the work discussed here.
A useful definition of emotions from Burkitt signals both complexity and
relationality:
emotions are multi-dimensional and cannot be reduced to biology, relations, or
discourse alone, but belong to all these dimensions as they are constituted in ongoing rela-
tional practices. As such, the objects of our study in the sociology of emotions cannot be
understood as things but are complexes composed of different dimensions of embodied,
interdependent human existence. (1997, p. 42)
Research on Emotions: Memory Work
Crawford, Kippax, Onyx, Gault, and Benton (1992) have developed an approach to the
investigation of emotions that has proved valuable in my own researchmemory
work. The method was developed by Frigga Haug (1987) and is integral to Haugs
theory of how people become selves and the part they play themselves in that construc-
tion. The initial data of the method are written memories that are reappraised collec-
tively to uncover and document how they are produced. The initial memory texts differ
from narrative accounts and case histories since they describe what was subjectively
significant in this memory that is produced through an engagement with the past. It is
expected that what is remembered is remembered because it is perhaps problematic,
unfamiliar or in need of review (Crawford et al., 1992). The remembered episodes
remain significant and the engagement with the past in the present represents a contin-
uing search for intelligibility and understanding. As Crawford et al. point out, memory
work is:
a method par excellence for exploring the process of the construction of the self and under-
standing the ways in which emotions, motives, actions, choices, moral judgements, play
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 199
their part in that construction. It gives insight into the way people appropriate the social
world and in so doing transform themselves and it. (1992, p. 41)
Research teams in which I have worked have used the memory work method in
various ways to aid an understanding of the research we were undertaking to produce
ideas for use in the research or the analysis, and to explore our feelings in relation to
our research topics and participants (Gordon, Holland, & Lahelma, 2000, p. 55;
Thomson & Holland, 2005). We found that the production and discussion of the
memory can generate emotional responses, but in the case of Crawford and colleagues,
the topic under discussion and sought in memory was emotion. Crawford and her
colleagues are psychologists, and they extend social constructionism to emphasise the
role of the self as an agent, as a moral evaluator. They also point to social specificity as
well as generality in the construction of emotions. They consider that the position of
women in social structures may lead their constructions of emotions and moral evalu-
ations to differ from those of men, that emotion is gendered. Many agree with this
position, often based on conceptualisations of gendered power relations. Some,
however, are careful to avoid stereotyping gendered responses, particularly in relation
to the emotions. An important part of memory work, after collective analysis of
the memory, is to relate it to social theories and the broader social and historical
context.
Crawford and colleagues give an example of memory work on emotions to the trig-
ger of saying sorry. There are two versions, both written before any collective discus-
sion of the memory, but the second written after the author had reflected on memory
work rules about focusing on absence and rewriting. The rules also ask for the memory
to be written in the third person:
1. It is evening. She is playing on the floor in the lounge room. Her father reading the
paper in an armchair nearby. She notices that hes fallen asleep, his arms above his
head. She creeps up to tickle him, a frequent reciprocal game. At the first touch in his
armpits he comes awake, startled, and simultaneously hits her across the face. Dont
you ever do that again he shouts. She is sobbing with fright and surprise: Im sorry,
Im sorry.
2. She was aged between 4 and 6. It was evening, her mother in the kitchen cooking
dinner. She was playing on the carpet near her fathers feet. He was reading the paper,
sometimes talking to her, sometimes responding to her questions or comments. It was
a warm night, he had taken off his suit coat. Absorbed in her game she didnt notice
him falling asleep until he failed to respond to one of her remarks. His hands were
tucked behind his head, his mouth slightly open, he was snoring lightly. She crept to
him giggling to herself, anticipating his delight as she initiated one of their tickling
games, watchful as to whether he was really asleep. He pretended a lot. At the first touch
on the cotton shirt covering his armpits his eyes startled open, his mouth erupted an
ugh of anger, his hand stung across her face: Dont you ever do that again. She cried,
loudly enough so her mother heard (or perhaps she heard him shout) and came in.
What happened? And after the explanation: She didnt mean to upset you.
As Crawford and colleagues point out in discussing this memory, the emotional
tone of the episode is one of sharp contrasts and contradictions. She approaches a
loving and playful father who unexpectedly erupts with sudden anger and violence. Her
200 J. Holland
own delight is transformed into fright and surprise. The episode as remembered throws
into high relief the discrepancy in power between her and her father. This is a reciprocal
game but he sets the terms (Crawford et al., 1992, pp. 5556). Gender relations of the
time provide a backdrop, father resting after a day at work, mother in the kitchen
preparing dinner, mother rushing in to undertake some emotion work.
Crawford and her colleagues use this particular method to research into emotions
and the method clearly can be and has been used in investigating other research ques-
tions and problems. Valerie Walkerdine takes a psychosocial approach to research and
analysis, which leads them to use and draw on their own emotions in the process.
Using Emotions in the Research Process: A Psychosocial Approach
Walkerdine and her colleagues (Lucey, Melody, & Walkerdine, 2003; Walkerdine,
Lucey, & Melody, 2001, 2002) take a psychosocial approach in investigating the expe-
riences of a group of young women whom they have repeatedly visited to interview for
many years. In their book, Growing up Girl, they describe their approach to two inter-
views one year apart, when the young women were 21, and they also interviewed other
family members. Crucially they are looking at the issue of the place of their own subjec-
tivity in the research process, and within that the issue of emotion and unconscious
processes. They point out that the approach is not unique and the use of psychoanalytic
concepts to theorise social phenomena and processes is growing in a number of disci-
plines including education, oral history, urban sociology and cultural geography and
psychology. Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson (2000, p. 138; see also pp. 151152)
provide a psychosocial approach to interviewing which uses psychoanalytic concepts
such as recognition and containment, as a way of understanding the emotions of
participants, as well as handling them in the interview.
What Walkerdine and her colleagues are trying to do is to research the social,
cultural and psychic together, and to develop methodologies that respond to the
demand for inseparability at the level of explanation (2001, p. 88). To do this, and to
attempt to understand and overcome some of the complexities and difficulties of the
research process and to work towards an engagement with the unconscious, they show
how they applied psychoanalytic concepts to the generation and analysis of research
data, and to the relationship between the researcher and the researched. The psychoan-
alytic concepts they discuss are transference, counter-transference, projection and
projective identification, and denial. Anxiety is a central concept in psychoanalytic
theorisation about the emotional development of the individual, and they see denial as
a core psychic process in the management of anxiety. They say: Denial involves a
refusal to recognise or appreciate the inner significance of an experience, and like other
unconscious processes it is linked to the management and regulation of anxiety
(Walkerdine et al., 2001, p. 91).
They wanted to engage with the place of emotions in the construction of research
accounts through an understanding of issues that are concerned with surveillance,
truth, fictions and fantasies in the research process (Walkerdine et al., 2002, p. 178).
They are looking at how the intersection of fiction and fantasy is lived for both
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 201
participants and researchers, and how out of the intersection, certain research stories
come to be told.
They engage in three levels of analysis of their interview data: At the first, they attend
to the face value of the individual narratives to ascertain the overall plot, the story that
is being told. At the second level, they problematise the narrative through exploring the
unconscious projections, introjections, and transferences at play, paying attention to
words, images and metaphors, inconsistencies and contradictions, omissions and
silences. At the third level, the researcher is introduced as a subject and they take into
account the feelings that the researcher had and any omissions and silences in the
responses of the researcher and the young women, which were recorded in field notes
at the time. The research team reflects as a team on their individual responses to and
interpretations of cases in an effort to shed light on unconscious to unconscious
communication. Here a lot of weight is being given to the researchers emotional
responses both in and to the interview via the later transcription and analysis. They
emphasise that it is not just the interviewee who puts up resistance to difficult feelings,
but that the researcher also tries to defend against such feelings. As in other forms of
research, particularly perhaps ethnography, the researcher is an instrument of the
research, but more particularly here, their emotions, memories, and subjectivity play a
huge role in their analysis and understanding of what was going on in the interview.
There are some terrific examples of the process in their book Growing up Girl. Here is
one of their own descriptions of the three levels of analysis:
One of the most important differences between the three levels was the approach to
perceived contradictions in the data. At level one the emphasis was on mapping the
subjects narrative through plot, sub-plot, chronology, place and event, as well as symbols,
metaphors and feeling. At level two the emphasis was on explaining any contradictions in
the account as an internal phenomenon of the person or family being studied. At level
three the emphasis shifted to the question of why this apparent contradiction had been
revealed to that researcher or research team. (Walkerdine et al., 2001, p. 99).
As you might imagine, using their own emotions and reactions in the analysis led to
disagreement about interpretation, but the team was not seeking the closure of an
agreed interpretation.
We attempted to go beyond both classical and existential methods and used a psychoana-
lytic framework to explore some of the issues between the researcher and the subject and
the implications of this for the production of knowledge, and then put this together with
post-structural and cultural approaches. It was in this final stage of the research that we
were able to bring some of these ideas together to analyse the data from within a psycho-
social perspective. (Walkerdine et al., 2001, p. 101)
The team argued that to be able to examine other peoples unconscious processes,
you must be willing and able to engage with your own. The challenge for those who
talk about gender and class is being aware of the emotional dynamics within their own
lives and finding some way of accounting for themselves, for their own subjective posi-
tion (Walkerdine et al., 2001, p. 107).
This is not a method for everybody. You need to be seriously convinced of the value
of whatever brand of psychoanalytic theory you base the method on, the researchers
202 J. Holland
themselves suggest that it is very helpful to be or have been in psychotherapy or analysis
oneself, and that training is probably required. But the method dramatically engages
the emotions in the process of research and analysis.
Memory work and psychosocial approaches are two rather intense ways of research-
ing the emotions, or bringing emotions into the research, which might raise particular
ethical issues. Feminists have been concerned about the ethics of certain practices in
close personal methods of data generation, such as the face-to-face depth interviews or
ethnography, particularly where emotions such as empathy and identification are
deployed in the process.
The Ethics of Empathy
There is a considerable literature about the dangers of women researching women, and
the need to recognise power relations in the close personal methods of data generation
discussed so far, where connection and emotion are central characteristics (Cotterill,
1992; Duncombe & Jessop, 2002; Finch, 1984; Oakley, 1981; Ribbens, 1989). Ann
Oakley started the ball-rolling by criticising the traditional social science interview as a
male paradigm, arguing that the feminist interview should be non-hierarchical, and the
interviewer must invest their personal identity in the exchange, even becoming friends
with the interviewee. Although not unique in its position, this was an influential article
and led to many heart-searching documents on power, hierarchy, empathy, and ethics
on women interviewing women.
Cotterill (1992) pointed out that there are moral issues raised by an interview model
that encourages friendship between women and yet has the potential to exploit them in
order to gain source material. One of the major fears of deploying emotion in this way
in the research process was that a feminist woman, showing empathy towards a partic-
ipant, might gain very good rapport and the woman might explore and reveal her more
intimate experiences and emotions. Whereas she might have preferred to keep these
confidences from others or even not acknowledged them herself.
In a fascinating article Doing rapport and the ethics of faking friendship,
Duncombe and Jessop (2002) push this argument to the extreme and curl back into
Hochschilds discussions of emotion work. They are writing about some of the ethi-
cal, feminist, emotional, and methodological issues associated with how rapport is
gained, maintained and used in qualitative interviews (p. 107). In their own research,
they found that to get their interviewees to talk freely they needed to consciously
exercise their interviewing skills in doing rapport with, or rather to these women.
They felt discomfort in recognising that even feminist interviewing with all the trap-
pings of empathy and friendship could be seen as a job, where the instrumental
purpose was to get good data for the research and hopefully to enhance future careers.
They noted that:
Hochschild has argued that the spread of jobs where women are paid to simulate empathy
represents the commercialisation of human feeling, and those who do such work run the
risk of feeling, and indeed actually becoming, phoney and inauthentic. (Duncombe &
Jessop, 2002, p. 107)
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 203
Duncombe and Jessop identify two recent and different trends in relation to research.
The first, occurring outside feminism, is the expansion of consumer research and other
interviewing jobs in commerce and government. These have highlighted the value of
methods that persuade interviewees into more disclosure, so that doing rapport by
faking friendships has in fact become a set of professional and marketable skills.
The second trend, within feminism (although not exclusively) where the earlier, relatively
uncritical acceptance of feminist claims for a special rapport between women has been
challenged by a much more sceptical debate concerning the limits and ethical problems of
feminist qualitative research methods. (Duncombe & Jessop, 2002, p. 109)
The chapters in the book in which their article appears represents this trend, and
Duncombe and Jessop raise the ethical issue that if interviewees are persuaded to take
part by the researchers use of empathy and the rapport developed in the interview,
how far can they be said to have given informed consent for the disclosures they might
make?
For the second trend, Duncombe and Jessop review some of the issues discussed
here about problems in the feminist ideal of the qualitative interview. They suggest that
some researchers have begun to focus on the conditions and ethical problems that
emerge when rapport does not occur because the social and emotional distance
between researcher and researched is too great. Like others before them, they raise
problems with the feminist ideal, particularly in relation to the power of the researcher
to make her own interpretation and version of the interviewees story, which the
woman herself might reject.
In an example from her own experience, Jean Duncombe talks of interviewing
couples about their relationship, and being torn when they began to argue about their
grievances in the interview. She felt satisfaction to have gained such revealing data, but
guilt that it was her presence that fuelled the conflict, and felt that she should have tried
to smooth things over or silence the emotions.
Stacey (1988) has been similarly concerned about the exploitative potential of
ethnography. From a feminist perspective favouring an egalitarian research process
characterised by authenticity, reciprocity and intersubjectivity between the researcher
and researched, the ethnographic method, being based on intensive participant-
observation in order to yield a synthetic cultural account, would seem to be ideal.
Formal and informal face-to-face interviews are often an aspect of the ethnographic
approach, but what is critical is the involvement with the group studied. Stacey,
however, argues that the appearance of greater respect for and equality with research
subjects in the ethnographic approach may mask a deeper and more dangerous form
of exploitation. Stacey, like Duncombe and Jessop, highlights the fact that the
published ethnography belongs to the researcher, and is an intervention into the lives
and relationships of its subjects, creating a dissonance between fieldwork practice and
the ethnographic product. But prior to that, in the field the ethnographer may know
things that the informants do not wish her to know, which puts her in an awkward
ethical situation of potential betrayal and inauthenticity towards the one who does
not know that she knows. Stacey gives an example of a lesbian relationship amongst
204 J. Holland
the group that she studied, one partner of which had revealed the relationship to her,
and the other not. These considerations lead Stacey to conclude the irony I now
perceive is that [the feminist] ethnographic method exposes subjects to far greater
danger and exploitation than do more positivist, abstract, and masculinist research
methods (1988, p. 21).
These problems and issues will not go away, if we want to do feminist qualitative
research, we have to live with and work through them. Stacey herself cannot abandon
feminist ethnography for all its problems since it offers greater explanatory power than
other methodologies, if at the same time greater risk (Stacey, 1994). Skeggs (2001)
broadens the discussion, arguing that debates in feminist ethnography have led femi-
nist theorists to call for every researcher to adopt an ethnographic attitude. Quoting
Haraway she brings us back to the feminist pursuit of knowledge with an observation
that highlights the ethical aspect:
Haraway (1997) argues that an ethnographic attitude can be adopted within any kind of
enquiry, including textual analysis. It is, she argues, a way of remaining mindful and
accountable. It is not about taking sides in a predetermined way but is about the risks,
purposes and hopes embedded in knowledge projects. It is what Peggy Phelan (1998) calls
an ethics of witnessing which is both responsive to and responsible for. (Skeggs, 2001, p. 437)
In the Field
Emotions play an important part in the field at a number of levels. It is important to
realise that the researchers identity and experiences shape the ideas with which they
go into the field, their political and ideological stance, and there is an analytic cost if
this interplay of person and research is not taken into consideration. The researcher
takes assumptions and emotions into and generates emotions in the field about the
researched. Kleinman and Copp (1993) suggest that if a researcher experiences nega-
tive emotions about their participants they would prefer to ignore, or repress (or in
Walkerdines terms deny) those feelings, since to admit them might constitute a threat
to their professional and personal identity. But these can be the very feelings (anger
and disappointment perhaps) that could help the researcher to understand their own
assumptions and their participants.
Sherryl Kleinman gives an example from her own experience that has resonated for
some years in her imagination and thought. She had negative feelings of anger and
distance from women in the countercultural organisation that she was studying quite
early in her career, which led her to put off doing depth-interviews with them for a year.
In that time she was the objective observer writing copious notes, but nothing about
what she felt. She hoped her negative feelings would disappear if she ignored them. But
as she says, self-estrangement is discomforting even if we interpret it as scientific objec-
tivity, and she had a sense of malaise and nagging feelings of incompetence in this time.
But once she did start to interview the women, she became more forgiving and tried to
understand their perspective on the organisation, which differed so radically from hers
and had generated the anger and disappointment she had felt. This change in her
approach towards the women coincided in shifts in her feminist thinking influenced by
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 205
Carol Gilligan (1982) and Jean Baker Miller (1976), and the appearance of work in the
sociology of emotions that gave her legitimation to consider her emotions. She began
to think of the women as having laudable values: working for little money for a good
cause. Her anger towards the women had also served as an inequality detector, enabling
her to recognise that there was inequality between the men and women in the organi-
sation, although they claimed to be equal. But she points out that she could only test
this hypothesis by recognising and attending to her feelings of anger. Facing my worst
fear, that I was unempathic, led me to articulate my analytic position and explain why
it fit the data better than some other perspective (Kleinman & Copp, 1993, pp. 5152).
Kleinman later reflects further on her experiences with the countercultural organi-
sation, focusing on feelings as analytic tools, and bringing in awareness of her own
biographical status as a new member of an academic department at the time of her
initial involvement in the field in Kleinman (2002).
Ruth Wilkins and Karen Ramsay had strong reactions in the field that affected the
research they were able to do, leading in Ruths case to insights similar to those of
Sherryl Kleinman, and in Karens to methodological considerations.
Ruth Wilkins (1993) describes her emotional response to her research on childbirth,
which was for her the site of a struggle between feelings of security associated with her
own experience of childbirth, and the anxiety she felt in the research process and
produced in her an extreme emotional reaction. She experienced acute anxiety when-
ever she visited a gatekeeper or did observations with all the physiological symptoms
of a panic attack. She became obsessive about consent, seeing herself as unwelcome and
intrusive, and she sought consent compulsively, including from two ethics committees
where one would have done, and from the 200 women involved at each stage of the
observation. Although this might be good practice, it was underpinned by anxiety and
low self-esteem as much as by ethical concerns, and the process was exhausting. She
developed a contamination complex, imagining herself as a danger to her participants,
particularly the babies, and her acute fear of rejection made every refusal to participate
a catastrophic event.
But through these experiences Ruth became aware that emotional responses can
generate a sophisticated sensibility in two ways: first, a sensitising cognitive function
which alerts us to the meanings and behaviours of others. Second, they have an impor-
tant interpretive function. It is a medium through which intuitive insight and inchoate
knowledge arise, and this in turn depends on the availability of similar emotions and/
or experience, in imagination or actuality in our own biographies.
Ramsay (1996) took on a rather difficult site in which to undertake feminist ethno-
graphic research. She discusses the difficulties she had using feminist research method-
ologies in predominantly male organisational environments. Her research was about
how the organisational culture of particular academic disciplines, in this case engineer-
ing and the humanities, affects the type of equality strategies employed in academic
departments. She talks of the two engineering departments in which she conducted the
research, each of which was developing policies to increase the number of women
students. She employed a strategy of empathic ethnography (Smircich, 1983) in which
the goal is not to become an insider, but to see the world from an insiders perspective,
206 J. Holland
attempting to represent this as clearly as possible. In the event, she found the research
totally exhausting and disturbing. She felt the need to engage in surface and deep acting
(Hochschild, 1983), managing her impression at a deep, emotional level, conscious of
herself as a woman and a feminist talking to men.
By attending to my feelings I was made aware of how uncomfortable I felt, especially when
I was in full view and the object of the male gaze, during meetings in the coffee room, in
seminars and so on My experience of emotional management affected both myself and
the research. (Ramsay, 1996, p. 142)
She had not been fully aware in choosing her methods of the effect that gendered
power relations would have on her interactions in the field. The methods she used were
designed to empower the interviewee, in her case she felt that she was in need of some
empowerment, given the power and techniques of control exercised by the men she
interviewed. Her conclusion is that methods of investigation used need to be carefully
thought out in the context of unequal gender relations.
These examples have been of researchers experiences in the field, but much of the
literature pays attention to the researched, particularly in relation to the emergence of
sensitive issues, and as we have seen earlier, potential exploitation. Hubbard, Backett-
Milburn, and Kemmer (2001) feel that there is not enough emphasis on the researcher
and the emotional effect of the research process on them (see also Corden, Sainsbury,
Sloper, & Ward, 2005, for a discussion of professional therapeutic support for social
researchers working on sensitive topics). Working in a research team, Hubbard and her
colleagues became aware of the emotional dangers for researchers undertaking quali-
tative work when talking to each other about their experiences. These could range from
discomfort to trauma, and could have quite extreme effects on their future involve-
ment in such research. They are particularly concerned with the emotional labour that
researchers undertake, but also recognise the role of emotionally-sensed knowledge in
the research process.
They describe a number of experiences that they have had in interviews that were
difficult to handle and caused distress. One example was becoming upset in an inter-
view, when a respondent talked about the death of his father and became tearful and
emotional. The researcher asked if he wanted to stop, not only because he was
distressed but because she, having lost her own father a year earlier, was worried that
she might cry. The respondent wanted to continue and pulled himself together, and
what upset the researcher was the respondent trying to suppress his obvious feelings of
grief. Although she wept later in private, and talked to colleagues about the experience,
it had an impact on her subsequent interviews for she intentionally tried to avoid
emotionally distressing situations by deliberately failing to establish rapport and empa-
thy, so having an impact on the data she was able to generate.
Another powerful feeling experienced recalls Duncombe and Jessops discussion. A
researcher felt extremely angry when a woman described the behaviour of her husband,
which she suppressed in the interview in a professional manner despite feeling that he
was a bastard. In a subsequent interview with the husband, however, she established
rapport and he turned from a bastard to the man who was generously helping her with
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 207
her research, and the interview produced interesting data. But she was left with a bad
taste in her mouth; she had suppressed her anger and established rapport, but was she
just being manipulative?
The authors draw on their experiences to reflect on the relationship between
emotion and data. First, respondents emotion may be used as data, for example, the
man who became distressed and talked about his fathers death in an emotional way
gave insight into relationships in his family to the researcher. Second, the emotionality
of an interview may influence how a researcher manages emotion in subsequent inter-
views. Third, as we have seen earlier, a researchers own emotional response to a
respondents experience can be used to interpret data and may be a necessary part of
the reflexive process. The very different emotional responses in the researcher evoked
by the wife and husband discussed above alerted her to their expectations of each
others domestic roles, the subject of the research. Fourth, emotional experiences in
fieldwork can have an impact on a researchers professional and personal identity, as
we have seen in some of the examples given earlier.
The authors suggest some solutions. First, a recognition and acknowledgement of
the importance and effect of emotions in the research process by managers of research
teams, seeing managing emotional risk, recognition of emotional labour and various
types of support as a joint responsibility. Second, strategies need to be in place at the
level of the team throughout the research process and of the individual researcher in
the interview setting. This latter might include pacing the interviews, note writing and
de-briefing sessions that establish a place for validation of the emotional work in
research. They also suggest that the emotional impact of doing research needs to be
seen as valid by the wider research community, and that researchers need to become
more practised in recognising and interpreting emotion, just as they become more
practised in making sense of respondents words and action.
Some Concluding Thoughts
In this discussion we have turned the prism through which we regard emotions in
research in a number of ways revealing different angles and effects. We have examined
the sociology of emotions, bringing an understanding of emotions into the concerns
of sociology, and into the juncture of the Cartesian dualisms through which the soci-
ology is understood. We have looked at methods for researching emotions and using
emotions in analysis and interpretation, and at feminist understandings of the ethics
of research processes that deploy skills of empathy, connection and identification. We
have found examples to illustrate these processes, reinforce conclusions about the
validity and usefulness of emotions in the research process, and reveal the power and
effect of experiences of emotions in the field. We have seen that emotions are very
important in fieldwork, both those of the participants and of the researchers. The
researchers emotions can have effects at the personal and professional levels, in rela-
tion to their understanding of their self and identity, and their capacity to perform in a
fashion that they would themselves regard as professional, and these effects can be
long term. A considerable amount of emotion work is called for in qualitative
208 J. Holland
research, and often the dangers consequent on this are not recognised. In some
instances researchers have been made quite ill (physically or emotionally) through
their experiences of denying, ignoring or managing emotions. The emotions experi-
enced by respondents in the field are data and need to be drawn into analysis and
interpretation.
It has been suggested here that emotions are important in the production of knowl-
edge from a number of perspectives. In most cases, despite some unpleasant experi-
ences, researchers value the extra power in understanding, analysis and interpretation
that the emotions they experience in the field can bring to the research.
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