ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the significance of emotions in research in, and after, the ‘field’. It draws on the experiences of my personal ‘research debut’ during fieldwork conducted for this book, and considers the particular issues relating to managing emotions faced by first-time researchers. Reflecting on the emotional engagement of the researcher while conducting participant observation, I suggest that the expression of openness, concern, sensitivity and other human emotions towards events in the field is the researchers’ strength; it is the means by which they understand other ways of life and enter informants’ worlds. However, the researcher who acts and reacts emotionally in the field also encounters a number of difficulties. Firstly, by forming close, trusting relations with respondents, the researcher ceases to be an outside observer and becomes a full subject of the research process, with all the emotional commitment that entails. Secondly, emotional engagement in the lives of informants generates problems that accompany the sociologist out of the field and on their subsequent return to it. Moreover, the post-field situation itself becomes a source of reflection and emotion, as revealing one’s feelings publicly risks misunderstanding by colleagues since, for many, emotional engagement continues to be understood as signifying a lack of objectivity.1 Finally, the chapter sets out the argument for more extensive public discussion of the emotional labour of ethnographic research as a means both of understanding the impact of emotions on the researcher and of improving the capacity of qualitative methodologies more generally.
