Methods of Exploring Emotions

Helena Flam, Jochen Kleres, Helena Flam, Jochen Kleres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367870522
• eBook ISBN: 9781317630456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Gathering scholars from different disciplines, this book is the first on how to study emotions using sociological, historical, linguistic, anthropological, psychological, cultural, and mixed approaches. Bringing together the emerging lines of inquiry, it lays foundations for an overdue methodological debate.

The volume offers entrancing short essays, richly illustrated with examples and anecdotes, that provide basic knowledge about how to pursue emotions in texts, interviews, observations, spoken language, visuals, historical documents, and surveys. The contributors are respectful of those being researched and are mindful of the effects of their own feelings on the conclusions. The book thus touches upon the ethics of research in vivid first person accounts.

Methods are notoriously difficult to teach—this collection fills the gap between dry methods books and students' need to know more about the actual research practice.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Methods of exploring emotions

Helena Flam

When I entered the world, monads were self-contained and autonomous. Economists often referred to monads in support of theoretical and methodological individualism. Today monads are social: scientists discovered that they communicate. They decide when to engage in exchange processes with their friends and in conflicts with their foes. When I entered the world, there were no homosexual giraffes and finance was neither sexy nor dangerous. Today homosexuality is a challenging fact. Deregulated finances both seduce and endanger—nations, enterprises and households.

Needless to say, the world has undergone massive changes in many other respects. My point merely is that today the world of “nature” as we know it, even the monads, question methodological individualism. They call for acknowledging diversity, sociality, and enmity. The world of finance both ignores borders and refutes methodological nationalism. Leaving individualist and nationalist methodologies behind, the contributors to this volume acknowledge sociality and diversity, not just in substance but also in methods. They offer exciting insights into how one generates methodological relationism and interactionism.

This volume explores human sociality and diversity through the specific prism of emotions. It posits human beings as inherently social, connected to each other and larger collectivities by innumerable feelings. It imagines societies as the criss-crossing of emotions webs. It differs from its predecessors in its methodological focus and its objective to demonstrate—even to the skeptics—that emotions are in fact researchable: one only needs to push standard investigative methods beyond their current limits. This entails forcing the usual research instruments, such as observation, interview, survey, text, or visual analysis, to adapt to new research questions, so as to yield new, “emotion data.”

Even researchers not interested in emotions per se might find this collection interesting. The volume consists of entrancing short essays, richly illustrated with examples and anecdotes, that provide basic knowledge about how to pursue emotions. The contributors are respectful of those being researched and are mindful of the effects of their own feelings on the conclusions. They also share with the readers how it feels to do research by recalling their moments of joy, sorrow, disappointment, and fear. The book thus touches upon the ethics and emotional experience of research in vivid first person accounts.

A few contributors to this volume recount how they joined the ranks of those who forsook standard positivist precepts of how to approach the interview persons (IPs) and data. They revive their very first realization that not only face-to-face bodily and verbal communication—but also potent, yet unacknowledged, individual and circulating, emotions—played a key role in the encounters they observed between public servants and their clients (Martín Pérez); the interviews they conducted with organic farmers (Van Dam and Nizet); or, finally, responses to a questionnaire concerned with how the privileged people of the North negotiated their power positions during visits to the South (Mahrouse). They also describe the methods they generated to catch the dynamics of their own and others’ emotions as these developed during the encounters in which they participated. Other contributors tell of how their own unacknowledged expectations interfered with the autobiographic, narrative interview about emotions (Gammerl), or caused deep prolonged upset—stopping the process of document analysis in which they were engaged (Gould). Their argument is that only once acknowledged and critically reflected upon do emotions help generate new substantive insights and a new mix of—even innovations in—investigative methods.

Most contributors in this volume go well beyond reporting hitherto unacknowledged fieldwork-related emotions, or pinpointing their innovative, research-enriching potential. They share their knowledge about, and experiences of, how to go about observing, interviewing and surveying, visual- or text-reading emotions. Each chapter includes a brief statement describing the research goals, or a specific research project for which the emotion-exploring instruments presented in the text were developed and employed. This volume testifies, and is dedicated to, very diverse ways of pursuing emotions, without claiming that it is exhaustive. In personalized accounts the contributions show that explicating emotions makes for more reflective and more ethical—and simply better—research.

Most authors in this volume are explicit about their definitions of emotions, and the methodological issues which follow. This applies particularly strongly to the first part of the volume in which experts in the sociology of literature (Kuzmics), contributors to the “narrative turn” in the studies of work organizations (Czarniawska; Gabriel and Ulus), pioneers in linguistic ethnography (Katriel) or bottom-up elite studies (Pixley), present their approaches to the study of emotions.

Three contributions to this volume address the issue of status and power differentials between IPs and their interviewer. While one study looks at top-down interviewing, in which the IPs have less status and power than the interviewer (Wettergren) and about which a fair amount has already been written, two others discuss bottom-up interviews in which researchers have lesser status, power and knowledge than the IPs (Kleres; Pixley).

Although the volume has a clear qualitative profile, it nevertheless includes two contributions on surveying emotions. These discuss procedures that facilitate the application of quantitative methods in the study of emotions. The first contribution addresses the question of how to combine a survey with narratives about emotions. It argues for moving between—for example—emotional averages and the semantics of individual feelings, to generate potent data interpretations; and offers rich advice on how to quantize qualitative and qualiticize quantitative data (see Terpe’s Q&Q of emotions). Another contribution engages in a critical extension of the burgeoning research on protest emotions (Van Troost). It reveals that missing data on emotions are patterned—explained by socio-demographic factors as well as nationality. It makes a good case for including more questions about emotions in the surveys.

This collection emerged from the growing interest in taking stock of the extant working methods within the Emotions Network affiliated with the European Sociological Association—which includes a fair number of ethnographers, historians, linguists, and psychologists, as well as Argentinian, Australian, Canadian, Israeli, and US scholars. It also constitutes an attempt to respond to the skeptics who commented that our theoretical books on emotions are interesting, but who challenged us to show how one actually does research on emotions.

It is worthwhile to stop to comment on the specific verbs and expressions that various contributors to this volume tested, played around with, rejected, and in the end adopted, to depict what they do to, or with, emotions, while engaging in research. Among these verbs we find, for example: acknowledging, pursuing, eliciting, releasing, unearthing, unveiling, explicating, exploring, or dissecting emotions; as well as collecting, surveying, and categorizing emotion data. This act of trying out, or playing around with, verbs and expressions—and the verbs themselves—communicate some uncertainty about what it means to do research on emotions, on the one hand, and, on the other, whether we merely acknowledge and explicate or in fact prompt and press our “objects of study” to reveal their emotions. The verbs depicting our practices are themselves borrowed from medicine, mining, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric, thus implying that we see emotions akin to body parts—substances to be examined, extracted, or dissected, gases to be released, mines or landscapes to be explored or surveyed, and texts to be analyzed or interpreted. Seen from this point of view our own roles appear akin to those of doctors, miners, topographers, chemists, or (political) philosophers. The verbs and professions reveal a clear bias towards the normal science that marks our own efforts, even though we aim at leaving it behind. Indeed, the researchers in this volume do their best to collect and make sense of the emotion data they collect. As this volume shows, together we acknowledge, unearth, explicate and much more—each author taking a slightly different position on how to define, and thus how to do, research on emotions.

Matching approaches with methods of exploring emotions

Although the texts in this volume are grouped by the methodological instruments used to address emotions, this introduction aligns these texts according to their epistemology and ontology. It takes on the task of presenting a few well-known approaches to emotions in order to match them with the methodological instruments on which they rely or which they imply.

The view that emotions are at the center of human sociality—and therefore deserve to command our attention—is central to this volume. It is a view that defies positivism and behaviorism—the hard currency of the social and behavioral sciences—which claim that only observable, measurable, and unambiguous phenomena can and should be subject to scientific investigation. To behaviorists, inner states cannot be observed or measured, and therefore should be left alone—best treated as the black box.

The shared position of departure of this volume is indeed that the role of the researcher is to take note of emotional expressions, treating them initially at face value, as data. However, the contributors part ways as soon as they have agreed that specific bodily expressions, utterances, or images, inform about emotions. Some take the view that, in principle, emotions have a physical, expressive, and cognitive dimension (Kuzmics). Even though not all three are accessible or visible to an outsider—leaving room for interpretation—it is possible and necessary to zoom in on, interpret, and contextualize interacting individuals and their emotions in order to develop or refine specific theses. Others take the position that experienced emotions are irrelevant, while emotional expressions per se are equally or less important than what those co-present make of them—how they are interpreted is crucial for the definition of the situation (Czarniawska; Eksner). Yet others, in contrast, argue that the capacity to express compelling emotions is far from easy—almost impossible in fact—if the expression is not underpinned by the “right” emotions. In fact, only when an emotional constellation is “true to itself ” can an individual put on a convincing performance and those co-present have little choice but to accept this performance at its face value (Bergman Blix).

A pioneering sociologist of emotions, Arlie Hochschild (1979: 557–8), dubbed mere emotional expression, “surface acting.” Stress on emotional expression had been focal in Goffman’s (1967) earlier dramaturgical approach. She, however, wished to probe deeper. Hochschild explored attempts to align feelings with the expected emotional expression, thereby bringing into relief the efforts at “deep acting” or “emotions management” for the sake of conformity. Hochschild argued, and proved via empirical research, that individuals are, in principle, capable of making a distinction between what they feel and what they should feel, even though capitalist management and traditional gender ideologies undermine this capacity. Responding directly to Hochschild’s theses, Bogner and Wouters (1990) pinpointed that it was not capitalism but much older “Eliasian” civilization processes that called for emotions management. This centuries-long emotions management made it impossible to posit any clear-cut difference between “authentic,” subjective feelings, and the prescribed emotions.

The position that it is possible to diagnose one’s own “authentic” feelings is countered from one more perspective that holds that emotions are inherently ambivalent. Not only do feeling rules often call for what one does not feel—a cause of much tension and short-circuited reflection patterns (Flam 2008; 2010). To make the situation more complex, emotions run in groups and their shapes are nebulous. This leaves much room for guesswork and interpretation—in real life as well as in research—for working out for oneself and for others which emotions should become operative (Gould; Flam). On the part of researchers, this calls for openness and attention to this very multilayered and multivalent ambivalence and, when necessary, for specifying the conditions under which it becomes reduced (Mahrouse; Gould 2009). Finally, those interested in proscribed or taboo emotions show that these can be released by methodological subterfuge (Gabriel and Ulus; Jalan; Pixley) or, alternatively, offered by or deciphered via narratives (Flam; Kleres; Gammerl; Terpe).

To locate the contributions of this volume in a larger field of research on emotions, and to pay heed to the fact that quite a few contributions to this volume report on participant or non-participant observations, let me start by positioning them in relation to two contrasting approaches in ethnography. Burawoy’s (2003) prescription for “reflexive ethnography” will stand here for a “standard” approach to theoretically informed field research. In contrast, Taylor and Rupp’s (2005) discussion of some central issues posed by ethnography will illustrate its “feminist-queer” variant. Together they demarcate the contours of the field of ethnographic research.

Observing emotions

Burawoy’s critical review of his own, as well as many other well-known sociological and ethnographic studies—most of which entailed participant observation—serves to buttress a twofold claim about what constitutes rigorous ethnographic research. From a constructivist perspective, he calls for much more reflection about the limiting and distorting effects of one’s own embodied participation¹ in the field, as well as one’s own theoretical lenses on the research outcomes. From a realist perspective, he calls for research not only focusing on the “internal” processes of change, but also on the “external” forces of change in which the “internal” processes are embedded and which they necessarily reflect.

Of immediate relevance here is that he hardly pays any attention to emotions. When considering how his own theoretical lenses influenced what he saw during his doctoral research on factory work regimes, he admits that he “was guilty of reifying ‘external forces’ ”; and, in a by-the-way fashion when discussing his findings, refers to both workers’ fears underwriting their games with management, and the distinction he made between industrial relations generating either hostility or amicability (Burawoy 2003: 651, 654). Apart from these and two other scattered remarks,² in Burawoy’s 34 pages of text emotions—even his own feelings of guilt—are a sleeping beauty. He mentions that he did not notice, and therefore did not reflect upon, the fact that his fellow workers were black. Arguably, not only his Marxist lens—but also his emotionally intense dream of “interracial solidarity”—kept him both color- and tension-blind.

Burawoy argues for “standard” research methods, relying on systematic, intensive observations, and communication. He vehemently rejects ethnography focused on the inner worlds. He not only rejects dialogic ethnography—which “reduces everything to the mutual orbiting of [a single] participant and [a single] observer,” and makes four dimensions of his own prescription for “reflexive ethnography” fold “into an auto-centric relation of ethnographer to the world”—he also clearly positions himself against the “cultural turn” in anthropology in which it “becomes a mesmeric play of texts upon texts, narratives within narratives” (Burawoy 2003: 674). I take this to mean that he would not even take a look at Denzin’s Interpretive Ethnography.³

Taylor and Rupp’s (2005) feminist-queer ethnography, in contrast, focuses explicitly on the question of how gender, sexuality, and power differentials affect field research. Both authors have become known, among others, for their research on emotions in diverse social movements. Yet reflections on the role of emotions in participatory observation are absent from their 24-page text, and emotion words appear as seldom as in Burawoy’s text. The most striking are the pages reporting the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: methods of exploring emotions
• PART I Emotions—a legitimate object of study
• PART II Eliciting emotions through interviews
• PART III Observing emotions in self and others
• PART IV Speaking emotions
• PART V Emotions in visuals
• PART VI Documented emotions
• PART VII Surveying emotions
• Index