A Rough Road Map to Reflexivity in Qualitative Research into Emotions

Abstract

In qualitative research into emotions, researchers and participants share emotion-laden interactions. Few demonstrate how the analytic value of emotions may be harnessed. In this article we provide an account of our emotional experiences conducting research with two groups: adults living with cystic fibrosis and spouse caregivers of cancer patients. We describe our emotion work during research interviews, and discuss its methodological and theoretical implications. Reflections depict competing emotion norms in qualitative research. Experiences of vulnerability and involuntary “emotional callusing” illustrate the insight into participants’ experiences afforded to us through emotion work. This prompted us to extend Hochschild’s theory to incorporate unconscious activity mediated through habitus, allowing us to demonstrate how the “emotional” nature of emotions research can galvanize analytic insight.

Keywords

emotion work habitus qualitative research reflexivity

Introduction

Emotions are central to everyday life (Damasio, 1994; Elias, 1987), and fundamental to how we understand ourselves and others (Denzin, 1984). They are an essential part of conducting qualitative research as without empathetic connections between researchers and participants it would only be possible to gain a superficial understanding of participants’ experiences (Cain, 2012). Qualitative research into illness and caregiving can be particularly emotionally involving. When the illness is life-threatening, grief and sadness are central themes and participants often articulate feelings of sorrow and despair. It is common for researchers within this area to experience distress during and following fieldwork (Cain, 2012; Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2008). The growing body of research on the emotional experiences of researchers has generally focused on the (negative) effects of doing research on emotionally sensitive topics with a tendency to frame discussion of researchers’ emotions in terms of risk (Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2007; Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001), either to the validity of the data or the researcher’s emotional wellbeing (Cain, 2012; Widdowfield, 2000).

In a similar vein, methodological texts continue to emphasize emotional neutrality to eliminate the risk of over-identifying with participants, “going native,” and “losing his or her distance and objectivity” (Fontana & Frey, 1994, p. 367). Although some guides on conducting qualitative research acknowledge the importance of emotions to research, there is little formal direction as to how researchers’ emotions may be systematically and reflexively incorporated as data or to aid analysis (Cain, 2012; Widdowfield, 2000). In this article we attempt to move beyond an “emotions as problematic” approach to a broader understanding of researchers’ emotions as inevitable and integral aspects of research.

A growing number of publications examine researchers’ emotions and their importance to the research process. Hubbard et al. (2001, p. 121) argue that emotions are “vital” to research processes and both researchers’ and participants’ emotions should inform analysis. A participant’s emotional outburst, for example, can signal to researchers what is significant (Hubbard et al., 2001). Reflecting on their feelings of anger, Kleinman and Copp (1993) describe how they were alerted to inequities worthy of further investigation. As Hubbard et al. (2001, p. 121) note, this “emotionally-sensed knowledge,” allows researchers “to gain insight and give meaning to their interpretations.” Recently, attention has turned to emotion work undertaken by qualitative researchers. Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, and Liamputtong (2009, p. 68), in their study of public health researchers, found that emotion work was “central to research on sensitive topics.” Carroll (2013), reflecting on the intensified emotional labor she undertook during interviews with infertile women, details how she came to recognize her own emotional, social, and bodily realities through her research. Despite these encouraging steps, there are few worked examples in the sociological literature demonstrating how researchers harness their emotional experiences in the field to inform their findings and analysis.

This article extends the literature on researchers’ emotions by offering an empirical analysis of two researchers’ encounters with sadness during fieldwork. Followers of Bourdieu might call this practicing reflexivity: turning “methods of constructing the research object back on themselves” (Fries, 2009, p. 326). We reflect on our emotional experiences of interviewing two populations dealing with life-threatening illness: spouse caregivers of cancer patients and adults living with cystic fibrosis, describing the emotion work we performed and its consequences. Finally, we consider the value of reflecting on our emotional experiences for generating analytical insight and offer Elias’s conceptualization of habitus, which emphasizes involuntary dispositions within emotional experiences, as an extension to Hochschild’s theory of emotion work.

Background

Emotions are inseparably biological, social, cognitive, and sensual. They emerge through relationships with others (Theodosius, 2006), and have a communicative function (Hochschild, 1983). Arising through interactions they are both embodied intersubjective phenomena (Williams & Bendelow, 1996) and embodied self-feelings (Denzin, 1984).

Hochschild developed the concepts “emotion work” and “emotional labor” (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) to explain “what gets done to emotions and how feelings are permeable to what gets done to them” (Williams & Bendelow, 1996, p. 146). Emotion work refers to the “management of feeling to create a publically observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7) in which people work on their own and others’ feelings to comply with cultural norms (feeling rules) directing the type, intensity, and duration of emotions (Turner & Stets, 2005). She distinguishes “emotion work” from “emotional labor,” the latter being emotion work performed in an organizational or paid context. In her seminal study she argued that flight attendants performed emotional labor to comply with organizationally desired feeling rules (Hochschild, 1983). In our article “emotion work” denotes any effort to manage emotion and emotional displays. Our reluctance to use the term “emotional labor” arises from uncertainty about whether the researcher’s emotions truly “come to assume the properties of a commodity” (Hochschild, 1979, p. 569).

Emotion work takes a number of interrelated forms. In “display work” or “surface acting” individuals manage observable emotional expressions by controlling verbal and facial expression, as well as gestures and other bodily behaviors (Hochschild, 1983). Work on emotions themselves, or “deep acting,” involves the techniques of cognitive emotion work, attempts to alter an emotion by changing thoughts associated with emotions; bodily emotion work, attempts to change bodily processes that accompany emotions in order to alter them; and expressive emotion work, changing outward expressions to shape underlying emotions.

Although Hochschild acknowledges that unconscious processes play a part in people’s emotional lives, her theory of emotion work does not account for the habitual, embodied techniques of emotion work that operate below consciousness. To extend Hochschild’s theory we apply the concept “habitus.” Habitus may be understood as the “social embodied” (Shilling, 2005): the dispositions or orientations through which people interpret, classify, and respond to the world around them, and which incline persons towards certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in particular contexts (Burkitt, 1999). One’s emotional habitus provides “a language and a set of practices which outline ways of speaking about emotions and of acting out and upon bodily feelings within everyday life” (Burkitt, 1999, p. 117).

We use Elias’s formulation of habitus to develop Hochschild’s theory of emotion work. Elias’s work is in many ways complementary to Hochschild’s: it is concerned with how emotionality is shaped to comply with social expectations, and, unlike Bourdieu’s work on habitus, explicitly addresses emotions. For Elias, the function of emotional expression is communication; expressions of emotion are “signs in the network of social relations” (original emphasis; Burkitt, 1997, p. 45) and communicate one’s social position. Elias’s (1987) work demonstrates how techniques of emotional management may be deployed unconsciously, automatically, and involuntarily. We suggest, through our emotionally reflexive journey, that Hochschild’s theory of emotion work can be expanded using the concept of habitus to explain the unconscious, embodied, and habitual aspects of emotion work.

Methods

In writing this article we draw on field notes, a shared semi-structured interview, and transcripts from qualitative research with two populations: people caring for a spouse with cancer, and adults living with cystic fibrosis.

The second author’s (RO) study examined caregivers’ responses to their spouses’ cancer diagnoses. Within a larger study on cancer caregiving, she conducted longitudinal, narrative, and semi-structured interviews with 18 husbands and 14 wives (n = 32) caring for a spouse at various cancer stages. Participants ranged in age from 30s to 80s; most (69%) were in their 50s or 60s. Findings showed that caregivers experience “temporal anomie” in response to the cancer diagnosis; the diagnosis prompted caregivers to reflect on their taken-for-granted assumption of a shared future with their spouse, reprioritize, and manage their emotions to either maintain a future-oriented perspective or adopt a present-oriented perspective (Olson, 2011).

The first author’s (PF) study investigated the experience of living as an adult with cystic fibrosis (CF). CF is a life-shortening, progressive genetic disorder affecting multiple organ systems. In the late stages individuals experience severe shortness of breath, pain, weakness, and restricted mobility. Currently, average survival is to the mid-thirties (Cystic Fibrosis Australia [CFA], 2012). Photo-elicitation interviews were conducted with 40 adults with CF aged between 21 and 68, most participants being in their twenties and thirties. Participants described doing “work” on their own emotions and on behalf of others. This involved a progressive refining of emotion work techniques and the development of an emotionally “tough” or “strong” identity. Like RO’s caregivers, they described a disjuncture between the present-day orientation they were to varying degrees required to adopt, and the prevailing cultural norms of future orientation.

The studies share a concern with the prospect of, and emotions surrounding, death. University ethics committees approved both studies; the risks to participants were deemed sufficiently low.¹ However, we were struck by our emotional responses to participants’ expressions of sadness. While we experienced joy as often as sorrow while conducting the interviews, our experiences of sadness brought us together to reflect and write this article. To facilitate reflection, we discussed our experiences of conducting these interviews using a semi-structured interview guide. We recorded our discussion and analyzed the transcript thematically. The paragraphs that follow illustrate the themes that emerged.

Findings

We experienced excitement and trepidation as we anticipated interviews; as we listened to participants tell their stories we felt joy, hope, sadness, and anger. Participants spoke of their anguish and grief as they confronted the prospect of their own or their spouse’s death. Sometimes a catch in their voice was all that revealed their otherwise hidden emotions. At other times sadness burst forth in its fullest expression.

The following vignettes illustrate those encounters, the emotions experienced and the emotion work performed.

PF:

An hour into Esther’s interview we began talking about the implications of her illness for her long-term survival. Her voice rose in pitch and wavered as she struggled to contain her emotions. I felt a wave of sadness in sympathy but I shaped my expression to hide it. I was conscious of balancing various concerns: I wanted to encourage her to keep talking but I didn’t want to ignore her tears. I wanted her to feel in charge of the interview but not abandoned. I worried that my questions would make her feel sadder but I was also wary of inadvertently shutting her down. I felt anxious because I seemed to be juggling many things. I was conscious of altering my facial expression and body posture to reflect the change in emotional tone. I nodded and made sounds to assure her that we were in a suitable “space” for her to talk about death. Although I had worked with people with CF in the past and understood the progression of the disease well, I believe that it was not until this moment that I truly confronted the fact of their death. Until that moment, I knew, but I did not know that CF will cut short the lives of all these participants. Esther began to cry and I allowed tears to well in my eyes, hoping that showing that I was affected was a permissible way to acknowledge her story. I blinked them away; the interview continued uninterrupted. Esther kept talking and soon stopped crying.

RO:

Joe’s wife died from ovarian cancer a few years prior to our interview. We sat at his kitchen table while he made tea and I asked him about being a caregiver. He talked about lying in bed and hugging his wife. His eyes welled up, tears rolled down his cheeks and he had trouble communicating for several seconds. He cried again, describing the way his wife made him feel appreciated. Despite her debilitating cancer and reliance on a wheelchair she successfully organized a surprise birthday party for him. The cancer diagnosis, he explained, drew them closer together. Later on, he spoke heatedly of difficulties he faced in taking his wife to medical appointments, sporting events, or grocery stores. Handicap parking was often taken by others whose need for it had long passed and venues were often challenging to navigate with wheels. While he, to a small degree, relived these memories, I tried to appear comfortable with his tears and anger—acting as if it was expected. At times, I felt sadness and frustration in response to his stories, but I didn’t cry. I was aware of my facial expressions and actively tried to sustain an “open” and “active listening” expression: lips closed, gaze fixed on either Joe or my tea cup. I left the interview feeling tired but indebted to Joe for his honesty. Several days later, while watching television with a group of friends, as a character learned his father was dying from cancer, I felt the sadness of Joe’s and other interviewees’ stories and cried for half an hour.

As the above vignettes demonstrate, we experienced strong emotional responses to participants’ distress. Some responses were immediate: frustration or a sympathetic “wave of sadness.” At other times, emotions unfolded over days or weeks. Of the range of emotions that we experienced, sadness and anxiety predominated.

Throughout the interviews we did emotion work on behalf of our participants, managing our own emotions and emotional displays. We identified three forms of emotion work: a new form we term “context work” and two others, “display work,” and “deep acting,” in line with Hochschild’s theories.

Context Work

We “worked on” the interview setting to accommodate the emotions we encountered. The interviews were often conducted in participants’ homes: biscuits and teacups served as props to indicate the informality of the setting, boxes of tissues indicated the appropriateness of crying. By conducting interviews in settings in which sadness and crying could be accommodated we hoped to reduce our participants’ felt need to conceal or “work on” their sadness; we hoped to undermine prevailing norms that inhibit emotional expression during interactions with strangers. Sometimes we needed to change the setting in order to accommodate participants’ emotions.

PF:

We have two interviews to talk about things, and this photo … how do you feel about talking about it at work?

Matthew:

I am not too concerned … but yeah, I know what you mean.

PF:

‘Cause, you know … things can get teary.

Matthew:

We could delve more into that in the second interview; maybe we can do that at home.

Emotion norms in the research interview were subject to an ongoing process of negotiation. Throughout interviews, we decided, with our participants, the types, intensity, and duration of emotions that were appropriate at different stages. Facial, verbal, and bodily expressions, modifications to the sociospatial setting and explicit discussion all played a role in establishing interview “feeling rules.”

Display Work

During the early phase of the interview we performed practical, routine activities such as organizing consent forms, creating facial and bodily displays to convey friendliness and emotional neutrality, and masking inappropriate emotions. These displays of “organizationally desirable” emotions formed part of the self-presentation ritual. To present as “professional,” we drew on images of the “competent, detached researcher,” concealing our nervousness behind friendly smiles. Our displays of highly managed emotionality united with other cues to our legitimacy, such as our association with a university and the consenting process, to create an atmosphere of trust. These preliminary emotional displays served to dispel apprehension in participants and mitigate our own feelings of anxiety (this expressive emotion work transformed as well as masked our feelings). Displays also initiated the process of communicating and negotiating the emotion rules of the research interview.

Throughout the interview we vigilantly monitored and managed emotional displays. We employed facades of neutrality and controlled emotional involvement so that our participants’ emotions took center-stage. When participants became upset we moderated our vocal and bodily expressions to accommodate the shift in emotional timbre: speaking quietly, allowing for longer silences and adopting “open” postures.

Deep Emotion Work

As demonstrated in our vignettes, we regularly experienced sadness in response to the interview content. Often a display of detached concern overlaid genuine concern or distress, which we then attempted to alter to a more manageable feeling. Twice PF “allowed herself” to cry with a participant: an expression of genuine sadness was modified to an intensity appropriate to the role of an interviewer. RO, in contrast, performed expressive emotion work to embody the role of the removed but concerned professional.

The deep emotion work we performed allowed us to achieve a more embodied and practical understanding of our participants’ stories. Drawing on memories and imagination (cognitive emotion work) we attempted to put ourselves in participants’ places, and move our understanding from sympathetic towards empathetic. We both, for example, drew from our experiences of ill-health—RO’s experience with a serious illness and PF’s experience of chronic pain. In connecting participants’ experiences with our own uncertainty, fear, and distress we imaginatively “walked a mile in their shoes”: although we did not and could not share their experiences fully, we began to understand their distress at a more embodied, emotional level, not just a cognitive level.

Conscious and Unconscious Emotion Work

Some of the emotion work we performed was conscious, but emotion work also occurred below consciousness, in an automated fashion. The expressive emotion work through which we managed and transformed feelings of anxiety or distress that threatened our display of “professional emotionality,” for example, involved both deliberate and unconscious attempts to shape facial and bodily expression. Likewise, bodily emotion work carried out to conceal our emotions or express them in a modified form, frequently operated through activity occurring below our awareness. Throughout the interviews the constant activity of monitoring and minute adjustments to our facial and bodily displays, was often only intermittently at the forefront of our consciousness.

Consequences of Emotion Work

The interviews were emotionally and physically draining. Repeated acts of display work resulted in an accumulation of unexpressed and sometimes—as emotion work became habitual and automated —unacknowledged distress. This had short- and long-term effects. Immediately following interviews RO experienced fatigue while PF felt irritable and raw.

We were anxious about our capacity to maintain the required emotional displays required of professional researchers. While interviewing Joe, for example, RO worried that her inexperience in witnessing older men crying would undermine her resolve to maintain an atmosphere conducive to open expression.

RO:

I was worried that they would think, “Oh gosh, I’m making another person feel awkward by bursting into tears” and I … wanted them to feel like it was a safe space—not a space where they had to manage their emotions on my behalf. So I was concerned about appearing comfortable.

Another source of anxiety was navigating the ambiguous and sometimes contradictory emotion norms that govern qualitative research interviews. We experienced uncertainty about the extent to which our own emotions were “permitted.” We were partly guided by the convention that researchers’ emotional expression must be highly regulated. Bursting into tears would be discrediting and would, at least temporarily, undermine our capacity to fulfill the role. Yet in qualitative research we also strive to establish emotional connections with participants. We were unsure how to incorporate these seemingly contradictory roles.

The “deep emotion work” we performed, in attempting to achieve empathetic connections with participants, had surprising consequences. Confronted by an acute awareness of our own mortality we experienced, like our participants, disruption to our largely unquestioned assumptions about the future. Like our participants we were confronted with a disjuncture between prevailing cultural norms of future orientation and our experiences of unpredictable, mortal bodies. We underwent a similar process of questioning what we repeatedly heard in participants’ stories.

Over time, we noticed our emotional experiences changing. Repeated exposure to distress and ongoing emotion work prompted emotional fatigue, sadness, and vulnerability. This was followed by a period of involuntary emotional distancing or hardening in which we became less acutely sensitive to participants’ emotions and less willing to perform the emotion work necessary to form empathetic connections with participants. Cracks appeared in RO’s efforts to embody the role of the removed but concerned professional when her grief erupted in the form of tears after several weeks of interviews. A diminished capacity for open listening and feeling with interview participants followed this episode. PF, towards the end of the fieldwork, experienced a “bodily refusal” to form the emotional connections with participants possible in earlier interviews. For both authors this emotional distancing or hardening was experienced as entirely involuntary.

Discussion

In our findings we illustrate and reflect on the emotion work we performed as qualitative researchers conducting interviews with people facing loss. We performed display and context work to put our interviewees at ease and establish the feeling rules of the interview. In many instances this emotion work was interactive. Deep emotion work allowed us greater insight into our participants’ experiences, but over time resulted in accumulated distress followed by what we refer to as involuntary “emotional callusing.” Here, we consider the impetus behind, and consequences of, the emotion work we performed.

We reflect on the contradictory imperatives guiding qualitative research and the uncertainties we both experienced while performing emotion work during interviews. This highlighted the epistemological tensions that plague qualitative research. In academia, affective neutrality is emphasized in data collection, analysis, and dissemination (Bloch, 2012). However, qualitative researchers are linked to emotion cultures within and outside of academia. Fieldwork takes researchers into various contexts governed by different feeling rules. Thus, researchers’ emotional experiences are linked to broader feeling cultures and researchers are forced to navigate across epistemological worlds. We found ourselves wondering what it means to “handle the situation appropriately” (Hubbard et al., 2001, p. 120). Is, for example, holding hands (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007) or crying with participants (Cain, 2012) appropriate?

The deep emotion work we underwent in interviews allowed us, to a greater extent, to empathize with participants, their emotive experiences reminding us of our own fears. Confronted with our own bodily vulnerability we were forced to question the fit between prevailing cultural norms of future orientation and our own experiences of uncertainty and fear connected with ill-health and the prospect of death. This experience parallels that of Carroll (2013) who experienced “foregrounding” of her concerns about her own fertility when interviewing women who had undergone IVF. Understood through an “emotions as problematic” framework, our experience could be interpreted as overinvolvement or “going native” and dangerous for researchers (Fontana & Frey, 1994; Hubbard et al., 2001). We argue that by alerting us to and helping us “know” in a more embodied, practical way, our participants’ worlds, these experiences demonstrate the analytic value of reflecting on researchers’ emotions.

As Dickson-Swift et al. (2007, p. 342) note,

In listening to a person’s account of their life or their illness experience, we are effectively opening up in an embodied and personal way to the suffering of that other person that may give us a heightened sense of our own mortality and vulnerability.

During the later stages of fieldwork, in response to accumulated distress, emotional fatigue, and vulnerability, we found ourselves becoming emotionally hardened or callused. Like calluses that develop on the hands from physical labor, this hardening developed through repeated exposure to distressing content and sadness, and through constant emotional work. Our sensitivity to “assaults” on our emotions diminished with this callusing, allowing us to withstand the interviews. The involuntary nature of this experience alerted us to the aspects of emotion work that occur below consciousness and are habitual, automated processes, which prompted us to probe Hochschild’s theory and supplement her work with Elias’s work on emotion and habitus.

We suggest that many techniques of emotion work are incorporated into an individual’s habitus. These techniques are revised and refined through practice. Any form of emotion work a person undertakes—display work, context work, cognitive emotion work—involves techniques that are an expression of that individual’s habitus. The emotion work techniques that are available to an individual will always be determined by the language, practices, ways of being that constitute that person’s habitus. Similarly, an individual’s habitus will incline him or her towards certain emotion work techniques and not others.

Our experience of vulnerability and “emotional callusing” prompted us to thicken Hochschild’s theory with Elias’s formulation of habitus. While the concept of emotion work resonated with us, we found unconscious experiences underrecognized in this framework. We suggest that pairing Hochschild’s conceptualization of emotion work with Elias’s work on habitus expands the range of Hochschild’s theory.

Furthermore, our reflections enabled us to question and revise concepts guiding our analyses. Through our context and display work we attempted to comply with contradictory feeling rules. However, we were unable to determine where emotional labor, guided by organizational feeling rules, ended and emotion work, born out of interactions between two individuals began. Our reflections thereby pushed us to question this distinction between emotion work and emotional labor. It became apparent that feeling rules and identities involved in emotion management were both interconnected and fragmented (Holmes, 2010).

Conclusion

We offer here an example of what it means to know “the world better … as one knows oneself better” (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 289): an example for others to build on as they undertake reflexive research on emotions. We systematically considered our own emotions within and about our qualitative studies by reflecting on field notes and discussing them through a shared semistructured interview. Then, we interrogated our emotional experiences, asking why we felt anxious, and how our emotional reactions, voluntary and involuntary, came about. Finally, we analyzed our accounts and used them to further interrogate the literature, prompting us to extend Hochschild’s theory to include “context work” and pair it with Elias’s theory on emotions, to account for our experiences of unconscious habitual emotion work and callusing. In doing so, we came to recommend the valuation, rather than marginalization, of emotions in research.

In viewing the social world as a “community of sentiment” (Kleinman & Copp, 1993, p. 57), we suggest emotional responses to interviewees as both unavoidable and desirable in achieving a more embodied understanding of participants’ experiences that allows for further consideration of theory. Rather than viewing researchers’ emotions as risks to be avoided, ethics committees, supervisors, and colleagues, should value emotions as integral to human life and respond accordingly by encouraging qualitative researchers to reflect on their own emotions and emotional habitus as researchers, keep field notes, discuss their emotions with supervisors and colleagues, and acknowledge emotions reflexively for the rich source of data that they are.

Footnotes

Notes

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