ABSTRACT
Most researchers seldom admit to the emotional aspects in doing and writing research; therefore, the accumulated body of knowledge in this area, although expanding, is still limited. Moreover, researchers tend to under report their negative feelings and to over report their good feelings and enjoyment of the fieldwork (Van Maanen et al. 1993). This reflective account of my own doctoral research journey engages the debate by identifying a host of emotions that were generated during the various stages of my own research and demonstrates the impact they had on the process, the research participants and myself. The chapter demonstrates that the attempt to ignore or separate one’s emotions from the research process may reduce the researcher’s ability to engage with the process and limit the data that could be collected. It proposes that researchers’ emotions need to be acknowledged and managed throughout the research process, not only to provide them with emotional relief but also to encourage self-understanding, making researchers aware of how their emotions influence the research process. Though I am aware of the distinction some scholars make between feelings and emotions (Damasio 1999; Solomon 2003), for the purpose of this chapter these terms will be used interchangeably. It is now widely acknowledged that the researcher’s values, feelings, culture and his-
tory shape and define the enquiry, and that research is often a personal matter (Wilkins 1993). This is even more so when research is undertaken by doctoral students, as it involves the students’ personal development and is sometimes motivated by the students’ need to take stock and make sense of their life and experiences so far (Reason and Marshall 1987; Boucher and Smyth 2004). Despite these developments, doctoral studies still tend to emphasise the rational and technical competencies of producing research and neglect the emotional aspects of doctoral learning. The role of emotions is mostly ignored in the standard literature on research methodology (see, for example, Bell 1993; Cohen et al. 2000; Silverman 2005). There is an implicit expectation that researchers will separate what Peshkin (1984) describes as the two general categories of selves that they bring into the field: the human-participant and the research-participant. Some researchers explain this approach by referring to what Hochschild (1983) describes as ‘feeling rules’ – that is, how we are supposed to feel in different situations, and ‘display rules’ – how we are supposed to express our feelings (Kleinman and Copp 1993; Young and Lee 1996). As members of a research fraternity, researchers share a culture dominated by systematic
methodology and an ideology of professional distance. In this interpretation of professionalism, emotions are suspect as they are assumed to contaminate research by impeding objectivity. Consequently, researchers try to control or suppress their emotions by wearing a mask of objectivity. Even those who abandoned this positivist goal of objectivity still argue that researchers need to maintain ‘social distance’ from the case to allow analytical work to be accomplished (Gilbert 2001: 18). A growing body of literature, however, is beginning to challenge the polarisation
between the rational and emotional in the research journey (e.g. Hallowell et al. 2005). There is a view that denying the emotions of research means also ignoring the relation between emotions and reason, in other words, the emotional nature of learning. McLaughlin (2003) maintains that the research process is deeply entwined with feelings and perceptual processes. Therefore, the researcher’s self-understanding and self-reflection strengthen the research. Feelings should be used as data, helping to tease out the researcher’s assumptions that are taken for granted (Kleinman and Copp 1993; Cylwik 2001).
