Abstract
Researchers are familiar with ethics applications that endeavor to ensure the safety of their participants, but only recently have they been urged to examine the short- and long-term effects of research on themselves and consider the risks to their own safety and well-being. This article considers some of the risks to researchers of engaging in research by exploring some emotional dangers the authors encountered while engaged in their own research. The authors use their autoethnographies to create a co-constructed narrative to identify some of the emotional risks that can be associated with being a researcher. The risks are discussed in terms of vulnerability, emotional labor, emotions as data or evidence, and emotionally sensed knowledges. It is Laurel Richardson’s argument that “the ethnographic life is not separable from the self” that informs the authors’ efforts to understand, rather than simply know, the potential of emotions in research.
Keywords
There is a growing interest in the impact of research on the researcher (Bloor, Fincham, & Sampson, 2007; Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2008, 2009). In this article, we examine our own stories of the impact of our research on our own professional and personal lives. By doing so, we hope to “. . . open up a moral and ethical conversation with readers about the possibilities of living life well” (Ellis, 2009, p. 17). Our stories came to be written in a round-about way. We had researched together for many years. One day our conversation fell to a particular research encounter that was harrowing for us both. Our work at that time was about understanding the experience of women who mother children with disability. Often we were awed by the women’s resilience. As we talked more of our experience as researchers, we wondered about our own resilience. Being convinced of the value of personal stories in casting light on the social/cultural/political context (Reed-Danahay, 2002, 2009; Richardson, 2000, 2001), we here use an autoethnographic lens (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013b) to independently examine the vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and doubts that we experienced around the same research experience. We then utilize our insights and understandings to create this co-constructed narrative (Ellis, 2009) that interrogates the possibilities and pitfalls of mining our own vulnerabilities and emotional experiences. In attending to ourselves as researchers in this way, we are both encouraged and cautioned by Ruth Behar’s (1996) words, “What had I done? By turning some of the spotlight on myself had I drawn attention away from bigger’ issues . . . ? What was I seeking from my colleagues? Empathy? Pity? Louder applause?” (p. 22).
We begin the story with Lorelei’s reflections. We then shift to her exploration of her fears as she prepares to open the file containing elke’s autoethnography and finally we present elke’s autoethnography. We discuss what our stories tell us about researcher vulnerability and how we might utilize emotions in research.
Lorelei’s Story
I am sitting opposite my friend and colleague elke, who I have researched and written with for many years now. Over that time we have slipped into a working relationship and close friendship that is uncomplicated and easy. Remarkable in its ease and lack of complication. We have finished a day of interviewing for a project on the resilience of women who have a child with ASD or ADHD. So we both should be feeling that life is good, particularly as we are waiting for chai tea and cake in a sidewalk café on a warm, sunny afternoon in a tropical, seaside town.
However, there is no joy at the completion of the day nor a feeling of accomplishment. Instead, elke and I both sit in silence, feeling exhausted and emotionally bereft. I need to revert to discussing me, because I can’t be totally sure of what elke thinks or feels.
I am exhausted, emotionally drained and annoyed.
Exhausted because listening to stories of pain, hardship and an uncertain future is not easy. It is both a vicarious and voyeuristic experience that taps insistently on my conscience, prompting me to be grateful that my life’s challenges seem so inconsequential compared to the experiences that these mothers confront. I look at their lives through the safety of a researcher’s lens, but on occasions such as this, I pay a price.
Emotionally drained because my years of training and practice as a counsellor, coupled with my ability to empathise, have led me on a journey that is costly to me in emotional terms. The cruel turn of empathy for me is that it pries open a box labelled unremembered and forces/drives me to unforget the many memories, emotions and feelings that I have skilfully packed away over time. Like Pandora’s box the stories I had stowed away of the anguish and pain of mothers with children who are different, has been wrenched open by similar stories of other mothers in another time and place.
I feel annoyed at myself for several reasons. First, that my empathy means I feel so keenly the despair and heartbreak of these women. Second, I had not anticipated the effect of moving from my comfortable privileged life, in which I operate in a somewhat agentic manner, into this particular bleak sub-culture of mothering. The sub-culture that I have experienced in the last few days is one of emotional, psychological and financial struggle, stoicism and self-subsistence within a ruling culture that neatly and deftly sidesteps responsibility for supporting those citizens who are a little different. When I think of the challenges many of the women told us about, I think of the saying “Take no prisoners,” because for these mothers, it is a matter of survive or perish.
In my naïve and rather unsophisticated attempts to “get to the truth,” a claim most researchers would make, the new stories from this current project move me to recall my PhD—I am unforgetting. To me the words unremember and unforget best describe the process I am going through. The words are clumsy, awkward and convoluted. However the simplistic terms of remember and forget appear too simple and slippery for acts that for me are more complex. My use of unforget and unremember force my mind to loiter long enough to acknowledge the arrogant innocence and taken for granted notions that I brought to the research site as a neophyte PhD student, and that I continue to bring to the research site.
Unremember is an appropriate word for what I am now attempting to do. When I collected data for my PhD 15 years ago, I had similar emotions and thoughts and formed memories that I pushed back. But I now know these are easily accessible parts of my memory. They hover, not always apparent, but watchful for an opportunity to be unforgotten, to sweep in and overwhelm me when I again listen to the unsettling stories of mothers of children with ADHD. When I finished my PhD—and now—my unanswered question is “Who cares for the researcher?”
Ruth Behar (1996) notes how researcher vulnerability can provide an opportunity to explore the socio-political context of the research site. Yet, I wonder, how I can maintain my emotional health when I become personally entangled in the emotion of the stories that I collect as data? It is these stories and the subsequent unforgetting that leads me to confront my own vulnerability. I realise that my own story of my exposure to the submerged emotions that mothers disclose becomes my therapy. For me, telling my story enables me to continue to listen and explore the difficulties faced by women who mother children with a disability. As Haynes (2006) concludes, “autobiographical and narrative research has its risks. By bringing things into the open, it can leave participants, researchers or those significant others feeling exposed” (p. 217). This is the type of exposure that can take the researcher to unchartered territory (Behar, 1996).
So now I am collecting more stories. It is fifteen years since I collected stories for my PhD, yet the stories I hear now make me aware that I am still vividly alive to the pain of many of my participants from all those years ago. Where do I draw the line between objective researcher, empathic listener and researcher as therapist? I know I am deeply involved in my participants’ stories of their experiences and I know that their stories have impacted on the way I perceive the world. This is a far cry from the value-free, dispassionate, objective researcher stereotype suggested by Blakely (2007) and Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, and Liamputtong (2009).
It surprises me that my heart still weeps when I unforget the stories, heard so many years ago, that Rose, Liz and Kim, all mothers of children with ADHD, told me of their isolation and marginalisation. Rose’s story continues to linger in my memory.
You hear all those stories about your daughter through the grape vine. So you tend to go into your little cave and you don’t come out. You isolate yourself and that’s bad. (Rose)
Rose sought her cave to protect herself from the criticism and condemnation of her family and friends who perceived her as an incompetent mother who was unable to control her child’s behaviour. My sorrow is heightened by the fact that she remained silent and silenced about her feelings for many years—until she shared her pain with me.
Liz had her own cave, her bedroom, where she retreated. It was difficult for me to avoid experiencing the heartache and despair that Liz felt for her son on the occasions he threatened suicide.
He had some good days and some bad days. He’d be threatening suicide or threatening to kill himself. He’d say “I’d be better off dead” and “I’m no good.” I don’t know how I got through it. I used to cry a lot . . . When we were in the other house he went outside to a tree and broke a branch off. I could hear this funny noise—it was a swishing noise and I came out and he was whipping his legs with a tree branch. He said “If I do this I might die and go away and you’ll all be better off without me.” (Liz)
Now, I unforget the night I visited Liz to hear this story of mothering. I can still keenly feel the emotional intensity and discomfort in the small two-bedroom unit when I arrived that night. Liz’s fourteen-year-old son was in his bedroom kicking the door and walls and shouting obscenities. I could sense Liz’s embarrassment that I was a witness to the violent outburst that she had no power to halt. I could also feel her fear. Perhaps her fear was for both of us. Her son’s violence could be directed at us without warning. Liz disclosed how she would frequently lock herself in the bedroom as her son raged around the unit. I left her home that night feeling some of the violation and disempowerment that Liz must feel each day. I could not manage her son’s behaviour nor could I save her from the possibility of her son directing his physical violence on her. I could do nothing to alleviate her plight apart from listen to her.
Kim’s story was shot through with honesty, candour and uneasy truth.
I want to love my child but you feel like there’s times when I could almost hate him. You feel like you hate the child because of their behaviour and when you find out it’s something they can’t help, you feel more guilty. (Kim)
The tension that hangs around Kim’s disclosure underscores the uncertainty I experience as a researcher. On the one hand, I want to explore the issue of mothering such children, yet on the other hand, I feel like a trespasser in Kim’s life as I expertly prompt her to expose the vulnerable layers of thoughts and feelings that she has buried for so long in self-protection.
How can I as researcher anticipate and deal with dilemmas such as these? My only action as a researcher is to tell the stories I hear and alert readers to the ways that society disables mothers by a lack of understanding and awareness of the desperate lives they lead. However, the concern I have is that my storying their lives is not enough. The women share deep personal stories of despair. Is that all we can do as researchers—share? This thought disempowers me as elke and I collapse in our seats in the cafe; it violates my sense of self efficacy as researcher.
I am overcome by the emotion of own vulnerability and the unexpected relentlessness of the stories I have heard of women who mother in a milieu that is so foreign to the protected culture of academia. The stories I have heard have been harrowing. The disturbing nature of the stories, for me, is my lack of understanding of how these women’s hopelessness and despair can ever transform into hope and survival.
“There but for the grace of God go I” fleetingly comes to mind. But my disquiet transcends this platitude. Beneath the surface of my exhaustion and annoyance lie unsettling thoughts that I must deal with. The mothers’ stories that I have heard are no different, in many ways, to the stories that I heard over 15 years ago. Another century, another time, has meant little to the way society deals with difference. I wonder then, what is the worth of my contribution to the way society deals with this issue? Can I continue to pursue a research topic when the issues that we have written about continue regardless of our work? Do I want to continue to try to make sense of a world that is in a constant state of change yet changes little? I sink lower in my seat, and deeper into my reflection as elke and I sip our chai tea on this warm afternoon.
And then the researcher in me struggles to the surface with an energising question that animates me with research possibilities.
What are the characteristics that enable researcher persistence?
Is it resilience?
But that’s another story.
Vulnerability
In this extract from Lorelei’s journal, we see how she struggles with both the stories she hears and the stories she unforgets. We are taught through the rigors of ethics applications that research should be cautious when dealing with vulnerable participants. Research should not cause harm or distress. Researchers should not deceive participants and the benefits from a research project should outweigh any foreseeable risks. Yet there is little comprehensive assessment of the short- and long-term risks to the researcher. Although some university ethics protocols now include a question about risks to the researcher, they remain primarily focused on the risk to participants (Dickson-Swift et al., 2008).
How many of us, though, are tempted to downplay personal risk? As social researchers embarking on a research journey, we may be tempted to treat ourselves as mere instruments of data collection (Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001), we may not know the vulnerabilities that we will touch in ourselves (Bloor, Fincham, & Sampson, 2010; Sampson, Bloor, & Fincham, 2008), or, heeding Burr’s (1995) advice that sharing the private world of people in despair can be “psychologically and emotionally wrenching” (p. 176), we may fear that our own vulnerability to “vicarious traumatization” (Pennebaker, 1990, p. 118) could act as an obstruction to the ethics approval process. But we need not rely alone on the administrative imperatives of ethics protocols, with the waft of litigious possibilities (because, let’s be clear, universities are keen to protect themselves too). Our qualitative research community has a responsibility: to each other and to our new generations of researchers. Few postgraduate research training programs consider the health and well-being of researchers (Bloor et al., 2007). A cohort graduate education system may provide some support, more or less formally, but, in the main, students and researchers are left to fend for themselves.
Vulnerability pursues us beyond the administrative requirements and protocols in to our writing, publication, and the public reception of our work. Autoethnography can be an evocative and therapeutic instrument (Ellis, 2009), requiring the writer to be truthful as well as vulnerable (Behar, 1996). When we choose to examine our own part in social experience, we know, in Haynes’s (2006) words, that “emotional processes are crucial components of social experience, but they could leave participants feeling exposed or vulnerable” (p. 217). The researcher is one of those participants.
But there are risks to declaring your own vulnerability. There is a fine balance to strike. The writer’s vulnerability can add another dimension to the examination of social issues or it can bore the reader with personal information that is uninteresting or irrelevant, takes the focus off the topic, and may seem simply self-indulgent. And furthermore, being vulnerable in research can be associated with shame and disgrace (Davenport & Hall, 2011) or the “fear of losing legitimacy, or being discredited” (Blackman, 2007, p. 700). And you may make yourself available to the accusation that you are biased and subjective and are using the research as personal therapy (Holt, 2008; Wright, 2009). Many autoethnographers experience hesitancy and anguish as they examine a topic that strongly interests or involves them; they hesitate to give up their “cloak of anonymity” (Behar, 1996, p. 11). As Ellis (2009) demonstrates in exploring responses of her critics, we take a great risk when we open ourselves up to the reflective turn. When we do this, we open ourselves to potential hurt. We have to trust that our readers will not use our reflection to hurt us again, but will mine our stories for insights into the social world.
We can feel exposed and vulnerable too in our relationships with our colleagues. In the following extract from Lorelei’s journal, she muses on her fears as she prepares to open the file containing elke’s autoethnography of their joint research trip.
Lorelei’s Reflection
It has been more than two weeks since I received elke’s autoethnography.
I have read her email and downloaded her story and then busied myself doing other chores.
Her email reads—“don’t read this until you send me yours.”
It may as well read—“open this if you dare!”
I am reluctant to read elke’s work.
My logical self-constructs a convenient excuse, telling me not to read it until I have completed all my chores and can sit down and read it uninterrupted.
My emotional self is like a reluctant school child ambling to the Principal’s office.
Putting off the inevitable—but not really knowing what the inevitable is. My reluctance settles on me. I wonder what elke has written about? Will my writing seem inarticulate and boring compared to hers? Have I been too self-revealing and written of feelings that are trivial and best kept hidden? Have I made myself vulnerable? I fear that reading elke’s story will further contribute to my vulnerability.
Yet as a researcher I expect participants to allow me into their thoughts and feelings and I expect them to fight their vulnerability for the sake of the research.
What did Lorelei fear? Why did Lorelei fear? In our work with colleagues, how often do we explore the delicate balances of our relationships with each other? Here Lorelei’s reflections alert us that the threads of relationship are complex and layered. There are fears and competitive moments, as well as collegiality, generosity, and sharing. In all relationships, there are boundaries, things we reveal and those we hold close. Lorelei worries over revealing too much of herself, not only to the world at large but also to her close colleague and friend. Lorelei’s reluctance reveals something of the complexity of our collegial research relationships.
In Lorelei’s story of the research trip, she reveals some of her emotional responses to the business of being a researcher, and to the travails of the women she interviews. Hubbard et al. (2001) encourage us to consider emotion in research in terms of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) and also consider emotions as data and emotionally sensed data. We will pursue this further below, but at the heart of interpreting emotion of course is the variety of ways it is expressed. Whereas Lorelei was struggling with the unforgotten, elke, it turns out, was struggling with her body—as her response to our research manifested in elke’s physical body in ways that all but overwhelmed her. Here is elke’s story—the story Lorelei feared.
elke’s Story
It starts with a slight scar on my sight. Just a little blurring on the right, at about the 2 o’clock spot. And I hope that it doesn’t spread. Then a little stab in my right temple, my neck tenses and a knife is slipped under my right shoulder blade. An ache spreads gently down my right arm, travelling slowly, like treacle, but it is nothing sweet. And then a clamp tightens on my head. All the while a creeping sense of sickness rises; dizziness; and a swimming stomach. Then the lights start flashing, a jagged line of electricity across the top right of my vision and the churning, rolling sickness starts.
All this is familiar, or close enough to familiar, for people who get migraines. It’s a pretty standard sort of migraine really, and actually not that severe in the scheme of things. Greasy, salty, hot chips are strangely therapeutic, painkillers might help if I get them in early enough, before my stomach has stopped working, rolling my eyes up to strain point as if I am looking at my forehead sometimes helps, and a dark room and sleep—and quickly. These things must happen quickly, or the pain spreads and settles in, rendering me incapable. These things are strategies to head a migraine off at the pass, but none of them are available in the middle on an interview, especially when I am supposed to be the in-control researcher!
We’re sitting in a small interview room. It is pleasant in that institutional way. There are three comfortable compact armchairs and a small coffee table. There is no window. I give a fleeting thought to occupational health and safety. This room is dedicated to interviews, though not usually interviews for our project of course. This room is for social workers and psychologists to speak with clients, but today the tables (armchairs) are turned.
We talk with Wendy. Usually it would be she who asks the questions and listens in this room. But today it is her turn to talk. Lorelei runs through her gentle introduction of who we are and what we study and why. She is always gentle, reassuring. Wendy knows all of this anyway as she has been well prepared in a welcoming morning tea that one of her co-workers put on for us. But we need to run through the introduction approved by our ethics committee. Wendy is keen to talk. Quickly, Lorelei gets to the part where she hands over the floor to the interviewee and asks, “Tell us about your experiences working with women who mother children with ADHD.”
I shift my chair slightly back, so that Wendy and Lorelei can speak in a dyad, with me a little to the side. Lorelei is running this interview and I take notes to supplement the recording, and add a question here or there, when Lorelei throws the floor to me. By now this is a smooth routine. We have conducted many interviews together and worked out our roles: who leads the questioning and when. Generally we work fairly intuitively, finding the ways between us to create a supportive context for this particular woman on this particular day. We hope we are communicating our genuine interest and empathy.
This week however, Lorelei has been the one to be mainly “in charge” as I have been swimming in a migraine fog since Monday night. And now it is Friday, early afternoon and the last interview before we grab some lunch, head for the airport and back to Brisbane. This has been a rich research trip for “data” but a nightmare for my wellbeing. Both of us have suffered in our particular ways. Unfortunately, my way of bearing the impact of our research—the burden of the stories we hear—renders me almost unable to function. Lorelei is made of sterner stuff, it seems. She is affected, clearly, and we talk it through together at the end of every day, but somehow, she keeps functioning.
I should have been able to predict this. After every interview we have done, together or separately, I have, like a character in a Victorian novel, “taken to my bed.” I have drawn the curtains to block the light that stabs my eyes, taken the largest dose of the strongest painkillers that I dare, and hoped that sleep would come and stop the world spinning and drain away the pain of the stories.
Stories of grief, pain, sadness, loneliness, toil, fatigue and rejection: these stories do not belong to me. But I have been entrusted with them. My job is to honour them in our work. I know it is not my grief, pain, sadness, loneliness, toil, fatigue and rejection. I do not feel I am adopting or owning the women’s stories. I feel that I am responding to them. And it is her story, as each interview is a different woman, in different circumstances, different schools for her children, different doctors, parents, husband or partner. But it is also a shared story. After hearing so many stories of mothering a child with a disability in a world that does not necessarily appreciate or help and is sometimes downright abusive, I can almost predict the cadence of the story I will hear on any one day. I can predict the major themes, the tensions, the silences, a the troubles, b the marginalisation c and the disabling effects of a child’s disability. d And I can foresee from the demeanour of the woman where she is at in the process of fight-back, how her speaking out and unsilencing is playing out for her and her child and what resources she has to demand a voice, take her power and wield it. Sometimes I can see that her resources are few and ineffective, and I hear of the relentless decline of her wellbeing and her circumstances, occasionally spiralling quite out of control. Sometimes a mother tells us, hopefully, of a new strategy, a new doctor, a new school. I see the yearning in her eyes and hear hope in her voice, and I hope along with her, trying to forget the many times I have heard this same story turn to despair. So, as she tells her story she goes to places of pain and bewilderment—we make that journey together over the course of the interview. She tells me of her grief and her struggle—and then she thanks me!!
So, I seek refuge in sleep.
The woman I have spoken to, the one who owns these stories, cannot sleep and awake refreshed and renewed. Her story awaits her. But this week we have gone from one interview to the next. From mothers to community workers, social workers, mental health workers, teachers and more mothers. I have not been able to swoon away to a darkened room after each interview. And now it is Friday and the last interview on the last day. I am not sure how I have managed this week and I am not quite sure whether I can survive the pounding, grinding, swirling, churning pain for the next 30 minutes. If only the room would stop swaying and the lights stop flashing. The swimming nausea is near vomiting, the pain in my temple is a knife, my head is crushed and my eyes barely able to stay open. For this reason we have changed our routine a little and I have pushed my chair even further back, out of Wendy’s direct eyeline, so that she and Lorelei can engage and I can be a silent observer and, as best I can, notetaker.
Thank goodness for recording devices.
It’s not to do with Wendy. She is telling the story of her good work helping women who juggle “constellated disadvantage” e —a multiple and layered series of disadvantages. They are managing mothering a child with disability in circumstances of poverty, lack of education, few life skills and sometimes abuse. Wendy is a good woman doing good work, she strives to make a real difference in real lives, but her work is hard and I have been hearing this story from many perspectives and in many guises all week. I am hoping that neither Lorelei nor Wendy can see my surreptitious glances at the clock as Wendy’s story of her committed work for women with many needs brings us closer to 3 pm, and time to finish.
Just as I am blessing all the deities who will listen, and expecting to hear one of the questions or statements that Lorelei uses as she draws to closure, she asks a question that opens new territory! I scream inside “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I CAN’T LAST THROUGH ANOTHER MINUTE AND YOU’VE JUST OPENED A 15 MINUTE TOPIC!” And I’ve no doubt it shows on my face just long enough for Lorelei to see, but, hopefully, not Wendy.
At last we’re in a cafe, in an idyllic waterfront setting. We’ve an hour before we need to be at the airport so we’re ordering pots of chai tea, cake and greasy salty chips and swinging from blank, silent shock to hysterical giggling as we recount the week’s events to each other—or more accurately, review our jagged dissembling.
We fly back to Brisbane. I am queasy and fragile for a month. We send the audio to a transcriber. I cannot bring myself to look at the transcripts for three months.
Research Is Risky Business
We were clearly strongly affected by our research experiences, with the broiling emotional and cognitive turmoil as the backdrop to our front stage (Goffman, 1959) interviewer persona. Any notion of a dispassionate observer is a nonsense in our case (Behar, 1996; Cylwik, 2001). Our reactions were founded in empathy and we are aware of the critiques that researcher empathy can be unethical and manipulative (Watson, 2009). And yet, to paraphrase Behar (1996), is anthropology that doesn’t break your heart worth doing any more? The extent to which we each revealed our response to our participants is not known. Did Wendy spot elke’s distress? Could Liz guess at the turmoil in Lorelei? We do not know.
There is increasing interest in the emotional work of research, recognizing that research is emotional work and may have emotional outcomes for the researcher (Bloor et al., 2007; Dickson-Swift et al., 2008; Hubbard et al., 2001; Lee & Lee, 2012; Lee-Treweek, 2000). Researchers have documented that research can engender the full range of emotions: frustration, loneliness, sadness, boredom and apprehension (Nutov & Hazzan, 2011) guilt, and physical and emotional exhaustion; it can entail crying, feeling moved, and experiencing fear and disgust (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009); it can leave one helpless vulnerable and forlorn (Mills & Coleman, 1994). Emotion can be stimulated by the relationship between the researcher and the topic, the researcher and the respondents, or both (Cylwik, 2001). Lorelei experienced emotional exhaustion, distress, vulnerability, and a sense of powerlessness; elke experienced overwhelm, physical pain, and distress.
In choosing to document emotional vulnerability, social researchers strive to develop a relationship with the reader, help the reader develop some sort of relationship with the observed, and move the reader at a profound level. Yet, as we indicate above, we became aware that it was “not without its perils” (Richardson, 2001, p. 37). Emotional vulnerability can be confronting and uncomfortable to write and to read. Nonetheless, it can be integral to exploring an issue and one more resource that can be used in the method of inquiry. There have been distinct moves to explore how to operationalize this resource, that is, move recognition of emotion from the “tales and anecdotes” (Coffey, 1999, p. 90) of our research lives, reveal this hidden ethnography of emotion (Blackman, 2007), and consider emotion as data. Here, we hesitate to call it “data,” preferring a non-positivist notion of “evidence”; however, we take a lead here from Hubbard et al. (2001) to consider our stories in terms of emotional labor, emotions as data or evidence, and emotionally sensed knowledge.
Emotional Labor
Sadly, emotionality is often still constructed in binary to rationality, intellectual work, and professionalism. But in taking the feminist stance that the personal is political and the autoethnographic stance that our personal experiences can lend understanding to the social/cultural/political context, we cannot avoid recognizing that qualitative research is both emotional and intellectual labor (Holland, 2007). Emotional labor, a concept developed by Hochschild (1983), is “the effort a person invests in expressing or coping with his or her emotions so as to achieve objectives pertaining to his or her work” (Nutov & Hazzan, 2011, p. 20). Hochschild pointed out that a range of jobs in modern society require the management of emotion. Emotional labor can manifest exponentially as involvement and personal interaction with research participants increases. It can include caring, active listening, showing emotions and empathy, and being supportive. As Bloor et al. (2007) put it,
Establishing and maintaining good fieldwork relationships requires emotional labour and such labour can be draining. Empathic relationships may generate distress. Quasi-therapeutic relationships may generate role conflict. Being privy to accounts of distressing events may in turn generate distress for the auditor. Fieldwork can generate anxiety and feelings of isolation. (pp. 3-4)
We see our emotional labor in Lorelei’s work to manage the exhaustion and despair on the research trip, and her reluctance and fears during the writing and analysis. We see it in the labor elke invests in managing her pain and her reluctance to re-engage with the research transcripts. We can learn something for the research from the emotional work that we reveal in our stories.
The emotional labor of research is insights into the experience of research for the researcher. It reminds the researcher that life is reason and emotion, and our emotional and cognitive functionings are inseparable (Holland, 2007) and we cannot escape this, perhaps especially (but not exclusively) as social researchers. Importantly, it signals a need to manage our own well-being. For us too, the emotional labor of research raises the question: Why do we do this? and more so, Why do we
Emotions as “Data”
As social researchers, many of us are comfortable to note that our participants’ emotions are data (Hubbard et al., 2001), or rather, evidence. Notwithstanding the issues of interpretation, we read layers of our participants’ experience through their expression of emotions. In our research, we learnt a great deal from the emotions of the mothers (and others) we talked with. All the mothers we spoke with expressed strong emotions: anger, sadness, grief, and sometimes, joy. Nearly every one of them cried during the telling of their lives. Sharing that emotional space, observing their emotions, helped us understand the significances and nuances of their stories.
Increasingly, there is recognition that the researcher’s own emotions are a necessary part of research (Behar, 1996; Blakely, 2007; Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Rager, 2005; Wilkins, 1993) enabling the researcher to enter into the participant’s world and hence gain a deeper understanding of it. In her work, Wilkins (1993) showed how her emotions constitute key cognitive and analytic resources and yield important sociological insights. Although reflexively noting and acknowledging our own emotions as researchers is vital to many feminist methods, reminding us to use our own emotions as a window on our own assumptions (Elliott, 2011; Sampson et al., 2008) we can also interrogate our own emotions as evidence, in Cylwik’s (2001) terms, as a layer of data. Lee-Treweek (2000) has found that the emotions of the researcher frequently reflect the emotions that the research participants are experiencing. In this way, while taking care not to interpret our participants’ words through our own emotional response (Cylwik, 2001), our own emotions can act as something of an amplifier, drawing our attention more pointedly to what we observe. Such a stance privileges the emotional as well as the intellectual components of understanding, urging a rethink of the relation between knowledge and emotion (Holland, 2007). Our own emotions were evidence, alerting us on several fronts: where to focus our own reflexive interrogation to unearth our triggers and identify them, where to tread warily such that our analysis is not led by our interpretation through the veil of our own emotion, and also, where to tread fearlessly, using our own emotions as an amplifier, prompting us to interrogate further.
Emotionally Sensed Knowledge
Emotionally sensed knowledges are the subtle knowledges, not knowledge of the emotions, but knowledge sensed through or by emotion—when the researchers’ emotional senses “gain insight and give meaning to their interpretations of the subject that they are investigating” (Hubbard et al., 2001, p. 121). A deeply empathic engagement with the researched may enable such knowing. Gair (2012) asserts a link between intuition, empathy, and qualitative research. Emotionally sensed knowing may be where these intersect. How to effectively operationalize analysis of emotionally sensed knowledge though is not quite clear yet. For Hubbard et al. (2001),
“emotionally-sensed knowledge” refers to the epistemology of emotion, where emotion contributes towards understanding and knowledge. The researcher uses their emotion in the field, in discussions with colleagues, during personal reflections and when analysing the data, to gain insight and give meaning to their interpretations of the subject that they are investigating. (p. 121)
As a field, social research has problematized the construction of “knowledge” and “truth,” recognizing that facts and truths are contextually and historically situated and “shaped by the intersecting contingencies of power, gender, race and class” (Denzin, Lincoln, & Giardina, 2006, p. 776). Denzin (2007) encourages us to seek both understanding and knowledge, arguing that we must consciously use both cognitive and emotional sources for true or authentic understanding. The work of analytically pinpointing the knowledges and understandings we sensed emotionally is delicate. Some sort of attempt to describe the emotions and the understandings they produced as discrete variables may indeed miss the point, in effect, succumbing to Game’s (1997) skepticism by objectifying emotion as “just another social phenomenon that can be studied using objective and systematic ‘emotion-free’ methodologies” (Hubbard et al., 2001, p. 126). Certainly the extent and depth of the women’s pain, distress, and hardship played out in our own beings in particular ways, we would say, in empathetic and responsive ways. The emotions we experienced during the research process reinforced our cognitive understanding of the lived experiences of the women we talked with. Likewise, the emotional labor of managing our own emotions to “be there” for our subjects and for our research informs both our understanding of the women’s lives and our understanding of the research process. Certainly too, for us, the depth of our sense experience fuels our commitment to the women who trusted us with their stories. How do we then frame these understandings as research “findings”?
Reflection
In the past, we have used our research platform to explore the plight of women who mother children with a disability, to provide them with a voice through a collective storying of “those who are silenced or marginalized” (Richardson, 1997, p. 32). As an extension, in this article, we explored the emotional risks and dangers to researchers while undertaking such social research. We did this through an exploration of our experience of the interconnection between our ethnographic life and our selves (Richardson, 2000). Our individual experiences meant that we understood rather than simply knew about the impact of the interconnection. We also felt that our experiences helped us understand the mother’s experiences rather than only know about them. We offer our co-constructed voice as academic researchers to raise several matters for consideration. We ponder how we might value vulnerability in research and how we might locate emotion in research in ways that enrich our understandings of the social world rather than take the focus off the topic of research. We wonder how we might approach emotion in research while caring for ourselves as researchers. Furthermore, we are troubled about how we might prepare neophyte researchers for similar challenges to those we encountered. We are not alone in wondering about these things but have offered here our story, co-constructed from our autoethnographies, as a further consideration of how we might operationalize emotion in research.
In dealing with these concerns, it is important that researchers can safely heed Richardson’s (1997) call to “nurture our own voices, our own individualities, and at the same time lay claim to knowing something” (p. 2). Academic institutions need to ensure that researchers feel supported enough by ethics committees, mentors, and supervisors to confidently speak their own truth in ways that contribute to knowledge and understanding. If researchers are to create a richer understanding of the world, they require the encouragement and support to risk engaging in honest and open writing that acknowledges their emotional and spiritual connectedness to their topic of inquiry.
In writing this article, we grappled seriously with the question of the constraints of academic writing. We are keenly aware that the subjective or self-empathic accounts of our emotional research journey risk disdain from those who reject the validity of sensing knowledge through emotions, be they reviewers and editors of academic journals or academic audiences (Holt, 2008). As academics, we have sought, in the past, to write with “authority.” Until now, this has meant objectively, with the restraint that we have learnt through years of engaging in the discipline of academic writing. Richardson (2000) attributes such restraint to the “self-consciousness about claims to authorship, authority, truth, validity and reliability” (Richardson, 2000, p. 14). Hence, our own private thoughts and feelings as researchers have remained hidden—until we risked exposing and validating them through our stories here. The result is that, ironically, our humanness, vulnerability, and uncertainty are qualities that could bring our claims of emotionally sensed knowledge into question. We put trust in our readers, to meet the challenge “to approach and act on [our] work with a sense of responsibility” (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013a, p. 25). Recall Lorelei’s fears as she approached elke’s autoethnography. After reading her autoethnography, Lorelei recorded the following in her journal.
Lorelei’s Reflection
This wasn’t the challenge I imagined it to be. But my life never is. We rarely have the privilege of being able to speak truthfully to our colleagues of feelings and weaknesses. Researchers are meant to be objective. There is no place for subjectivity. We become focused on knowledge, writing a perceived truth, publishing, but there is no end. The cycle is repeated many times throughout an academic career. But at what cost? How is it that no one thinks to challenge the cycle, the energy used or the emotional cost to the researcher?
Of course, many researchers assert subjectivity and reflexivity, especially as prompted by feminist methods. But perhaps this is something each of us has to discover for ourselves, especially those of us schooled in the authority of objectivity. Perhaps we will find that the emotional risks we take as researchers in the academy can be managed, and that some are not as great as we imagined.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
