Emotionally Involved

The Impact of Researching Rape

Rebecca Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136054464
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Tackling difficult issues, Emotionally Involved gives a vivid picture the challenges researchers who studey traumatic events face. It is essential reading for researchers, therapists, fieldworkers, for those on the frontlines of rape crisis and domestic violence work, and for anyone concerned with the role of emotions in social science.

one

Creating Difference —
Thinking versus Feeling

The Role of Emotions in Research

Historically, social scientists have been silent, absent researchers. We are ghostwriters for our own work. The work “was done,” the experiment “was conducted,” the setting “was observed,” the results “were obtained.” This affinity for the passive voice reflected not only stylistic preferences but also ideological norms regarding the researchers' role in the scientific process. There is no subject in passive constructions: things happen, things occur. Who did those things and what those individuals think, value, and feel is difficult to discern. It's as if it doesn't matter who conducted the study because what really matters is the method by which the knowledge “was acquired” and the actual knowledge itself. The “I” is not in our sentences because who we are as social scientists—what we value and feel—is of less scientific interest. In some respects, this makes sense. More often than not, we are studying those other than ourselves. Who we are really isn't the focus. Yet who we are undoubtedly affects how we understand the world and hence how we understand our research. We may try to erase ourselves in written discourse, but we cannot erase our effect on our research.

Although notable philosophers of science (e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Kuhn) and empirical social scientists (e.g., Donald Campbell, Lee Cronbach) have generally agreed that researchers do indeed exert their humanness on research, this is not necessarily viewed as a good thing. The perspective of scientist-as-contaminant is a strong and enduring norm. Psychology instructors specifically teach students how to avoid contaminating their own studies (e.g., don't let your subjects know what you hypothesized). Students in other social science disciplines receive equivalent warnings (e.g., the don't-go-native advice still applies for many sociologists and anthropologists). Yet, for as much as we might not want to believe that our values and feelings influence our work, we cannot rid ourselves of these factors by pretending they're not there or by valuing their exclusion. The researcher is a key figure in the scientific process whose personal experiences are worthy of reflection and examination.

To date, such analyses have focused primarily on cognitive influences: the effects of researchers' attitudes, beliefs, and values on research outcomes. What seems to be largely missing from these discussion is an understanding of the affective influences.¹ In this chapter, I examine what role emotions could have in the research process. Understanding how emotions enter into research is inextricably linked to ontological and epistemological views on the nature of knowledge. For instance, researchers' emotions have limited utility within a positivist framework, which postulates an objective reality that can be objectively verified. Feelings, like other potential “biases” (values, beliefs, expectations) may hinder researchers' abilities to capture reality. Although most positivists acknowledge that such an idealized process cannot be achieved (e.g., Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Cronbach, 1975), researchers should at least try to minimize the effects of emotions. By contrast, post positivist theorists (e.g., Habermas) question the existence of objective reality and instead stipulate that “reality” is socially constructed. Embracing the subjectivity of science provides some place for humanness in research. My goal here is not to continue the positivist/postpositivist, objectivity/subjectivity debates, but rather to examine how different disciplines in the social sciences, with their associated epistemological allegiances, construct a role for emotions in research. My analysis suggests that feelings, like our beliefs and values, do indeed shape our research and are a natural part of inquiry. Furthermore, I argue that this is a reflexive process: our emotions influence our research, and our research can affect us emotionally. This emotional dialogue between our inner feelings and our research can be an important intellectual resource. Examining our feelings and the emotional impact that research has on us can bring a deeper intellectual understanding of social phenomenon.

In this chapter, I first examine how this difference between thinking and feeling is created and maintained. Drawing on the works of sociologists Susan Krieger and Shulamit Reinharz, I argue that the socialization of a researcher involves learning not to feel. Examples from “classic” texts in psychology and sociology, as well as contemporary training texts, demonstrate the specific ways in which social scientists are taught to devalue emotions as a source of knowledge. Second, because emotions are indeed an integral part of our lives and influence our thinking, we can challenge these enduring disciplinary norms and consider the possibilities for emotion in research. Philosophers Chesire Calhoun and Alison Jaggar have provided an epistemological foundation for emotions as a legitimate source of knowledge. Building upon the arguments of sociologists Carolyn Ellis and Ruth Wilkins, I consider what can be gained intellectually through the systematic investigation of researchers' emotions. Some research topics by their very nature are highly emotional and can provide a useful context for understanding the role of emotions in social science. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to the violence against women literature to explore how studying rape, domestic violence, and incest affects researchers emotionally. But the question remains: How can these emotions inform science? To provide one answer to this question, I then outline the specific research project that is the focus of this book. Over the course of a year, my research team members and I interviewed over a hundred rape survivors, listening to and bearing witness to their stories of trauma and recovery. At the conclusion of this phase of data collection, I then interviewed the project interviewers to learn more about how this work affected them emotionally, and if and how these emotions developed their substantive understanding of sexual violence. This researching-the-researcher project provides one model of reflexive learning where emotion and intellect are not forced separate, but allowed to mingle and inform each other.

The Socialization of the Researcher: Learning Not to Feel

It's a strange thing: feeling, sentient beings try very hard to be, for a specific role in their lives, only rational, not emotional. Whereas I doubt any scientist has ever truly been able to achieve that feat, we nonetheless learn not to admit feeling. As sociologist Susan Krieger argued in her book Social Science and the Self (1991), we learn that the self, and all of its associated emotions, has no place in science:

The social science disciplines tend to view the self of the social scientific observer as a contaminant. The self—the unique inner life of the observer—is treated as something to be separated out, neutralized, minimized, standardized, and controlled. At the same time the observer is expected to use the self to the end of understanding the world.… We are taught to avoid attention to the authorial first person, whose view, and whose choices, a study represents. We learn to become invisible authors. If we cannot be objective, at least we should not call too much attention to the fact of our subjectivity, (p. 1)

The expression of an individual perspective in social science is a difficult accomplishment in part because individuality is theoretically unpopular. The social sciences tend not only to view the self of a researcher as a contaminant, but they also view the selves of people studied as invisible, (p. 43)

Drawing from her own personal experiences, Krieger reasoned that this norm of emotional distance is created within us over years of socialization. We are taught to speak and write in a standardized way that reflects the standardized way in which we are supposed to think about and understand the world. The key to this socialization process is its emphasis on thinking and developing normative practices for conceptualizing research. What we learn about feeling and emotion is that we're not supposed to feel. For example, Krieger writes,

These are ideas I have internalized at least since graduate school. They reflect the fact that social science ideology is full of prohibitions against conspicuous use of the self. It is full of guidelines that suggest that the standard forms of expression are the only correct forms, (p. 2)

Krieger contends that by detaching ourselves from the research process, social scientists distance ourselves from our research subjects, thereby rendering what we study more difficult to see and understand. She encourages us to acknowledge more honestly than we do the extent to which our studies are reflections of our inner lives:

I wish to suggest that the self is not a contaminant, but rather that it is the key to what we know, and that methodological discussions might fruitfully be revised to acknowledge the involvement of the self in a positive manner. The self is not something that can be disengaged from knowledge or from research processes. Rather, we need to understand the nature of our participation in what we know. The problem we need to worry about is not the effect of an observer's inner self on evidence from the outside world, but the ways that the traditional dismissal of the self may hinder the development of each individual's unique perspective, (pp. 29–30)

A similar concern about this socialization not to feel was raised by sociologist Shulamit Reinharz. In her book, On Becoming a Social Scientist (1979), Reinharz explores the contradictions in sociological method and describes how students of sociology are socialized not to question dominant ideologies:

During the socialization process students confront conflicts but are unsure of the extent to which they can explore them since strong pressures to specialize compel students to choose a substantive camp early and develop a firm commitment expressed in competence. In addition, the student does not know to what extent the values inherent in the discipline can be challenged. Are there certain questions that may not be asked at all without violating the definition of the profession itself? (pp. 12–13)

This socialization can stall individual expression and creativity. Before students can learn otherwise, they are taught that sociology must be impersonal and objective, and be oriented to the prediction and control of events. But, as Reinharz argues, the sociologist must use one's self in the research process—the entire process is touched by the researcher's human-ness. In highlighting this contradiction, Reinharz calls for a sociological method that acknowledges the personal elements of research and seeks to understand how researchers' values, beliefs, and emotions contribute to knowledge: “The sociology I would do, therefore, would stem from my personal values as much as from my understanding of methods” (p. 9).

Krieger and Reinharz suggest that there is a hierarchical relationship between thinking and feeling in the social sciences. This difference is created and maintained by teaching students to reject the role of the self, which includes rejecting emotionality. Certainly my own experiences of being trained as a psychologist and my current encounters training doctoral students resonate with Krieger's and Reinharz's socialization theory. But how does this happen? How are students trained not to feel in research? Both Krieger and Reinharz describe how, as students, their classroom climates did not encourage questioning these norms. Certainly the attitudes and behaviors of instructors communicate expectations, but there is also more concrete and enduring evidence of this socialization process. Analysis of the “classic” texts in psychology and sociology, as well as their contemporary counterparts, reveals one way in which students are taught to devalue emotionality in social science. These training texts specifically state that emotions have minimal use in research.

The classic texts of psychology and sociology set the stage for the exclusion of emotions in research by reminding researchers how they can unduly and inappropriately influence the scientific process. Often assigned by instructors for historical orientation, these texts indoctrinate students into standard ideologies. The readings we were assigned as students, and those we assign to our students, begin that socialization process through their emphasis on rationality, not emotionality. By labeling these works as “classics,” they become the referent norm. In psychology, classic texts emphasize objectivity as a fundamental goal. As a student of psychology, I was raised on a steady diet of logical positivism and experimental studies through the writings of Donald Campbell, Lee Cronbach, Julian Stanley, and Robert Rosenthal. These writings taught me that there is truth and order to the social world. My job, as I came to understand it from these texts, was to find that truth, verify it, and replicate the process by which I found it. The dispassionate language of these writings reinforced the value of neutrality and objectivity. It is important to note, however, that these classical texts readily acknowledge that bias is impossible to avoid because our humanness will always come through. In fact, Campbell and Stanley (1963) once referred to social sciences as an “impure art.” My reading of these texts and my experiences of being taught them suggest a longing for “pure” science. That we cannot mimic the physical sciences is disappointing but perhaps unavoidable. At the very least, we should strive to remove as many extraneous influences as possible.

Underscoring this need for attention to our biases, decades of research in social psychology has demonstrated that people are indeed influenced by their attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. Researchers are no exception. For example, classic texts by Robert Rosenthal, such as Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research (1966) and Artifact in Behavioral Research (with Ralph Rosnow) (1969), enumerate the varied ways in which experimenters' per-sonological factors can bias a study'sfindings. Rosenthal's laboratory studies demonstrated that researchers can systematically attune to or ignore key behaviors in observational research. We can also communicate, subtly or overtly, to our research participants the nature of our experimental hypotheses, thereby creating a demand for the very effect we hoped to objectively verify. Quite simply, Rosenthal's work demonstrates that if researchers are not careful, we could find exactly what we're looking for, but for all the wrong reasons and by all the wrong methods. Rosenthal's experimental laboratory studies beg the question about bias in the real world: If we can be so “flawed” in lab work, dare we ask what happens in the real world? The same effect. As Charles Lord and his colleagues found:

People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept “confirming” evidence at face value while subjecting “disconfinuing” evidence to critical evaluation, and as a result to draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979, p. 2098)

Because “strong opinions” are often emotion-laden, Lord's research suggests that emotions can adversely affect the quality of research. This seemingly detrimental effect continues to be documented in more recent work. Timothy Wilson and his colleagues found that scientists—faculty in major medical schools and research psychologists—were significantly more likely to overlook methodological flaws on research that they deemed more important (Wilson, DePaulo, Mook, & Klaaren, 1993). When considering research about an “important” topic, one with social and personal meaning (manipulated in their experiment as heartburn versus heart disease), scientists were more forgiving of methodological transgressions (demonstrated by more lenient ratings regarding publication). “Bad” work can, and does, get published. The more we “care” about a topic, the less likely we are to critically evaluate its research. Although Wilson's and his colleagues' work does not specifically address the role of emotions, the “importance” dimension is probably emotionally charged. These results indicate that our emotions may cloud our scientific judgments. What, then, is the role of emotions in research? What is the take-home message to students who read these Rosenthalesque studies? Emotions appear to hinder good work, and therefore, like all other forms of bias, they should be excluded.

It is interesting to contrast psychology's rhetoric on the role of emotions in research with the struggles sociology has undertaken on these matters. In psychology, a researcher's values, beliefs, and emotions are essentially viewed as sources of bias, and because we should strive to avoid bias, we must try to avoid emotionality in our work.² The classic texts of sociology lead researchers along a different path of thinking about objectivity in science. In many classic texts of sociology, the following is at issue: Can social scientists view the data of their research in some objective manner or not? If not, what influences and biases these views? The classic writings of Max Weber, such as The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947) and Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949), maintain that the social sciences could be value-free. Yet sociological philosophers such as Habermas strongly questioned Weber's thesis. In such texts as On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Habermas challenged the objectivist illusion. The social world does not operate in law like universal order. His postpositivist critical theories stipulate that the search for one truth is futile because there is no such thing. We should not be so worried about the potential “damage” our humanness may inflict upon our investigations because there is no one single truth to be tainted. Knowledge is socially constructed, so Habermas advocates for a paradigm of mutual understanding in which the researcher and the research participants engage each other in the identification and creation of knowledge. Similarly, Anthony Giddens concluded in his book New Rules of Sociological Method (1993) that researchers always influence what th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Other
• Preface
• 1 Creating Difference—Thinking versus Feeling
• 2 From Thinking to Feeling
• 3 Feeling
• 4 From Feeling to Thinking
• 5 Creating Balance—Thinking and Feeling
• Appendix A The Development, Process, and Methodology of the Researching-the-Researcher Study
• Appendix B The Researching-the-Researcher Interview Protocol
• Notes
• References
• Index