Making Space for the Emotional Labour of Qualitative Research
“It is also worth reflecting on what it means to live feminist lives. We come up against what we are against. And there are costs in this history: for many of the women who wrote the texts that were to become feminist classics the costs were personal and high. But going back is also to be energised: and to be reminded that a feminist life was and is full of joy, as worlds are opened up, as connections are made, as possibilities are not given up in advance of their loss.”
Women are all too familiar with emotional labour; in our domestic and intimate lives we are often the ones to bear the brunt of it. And while we may have thought we had escaped its grip when it comes to the domain of our paid work – a small but growing body of research has found that emotional labour is a component of much of the work undertaken by qualitative researchers.
For a long time now concern for research participants’ well being has been the focus of much of the conversation around the impacts of qualitative research. Recently however, there has been a growing interest in the potential impact of qualitative research, particularly qualitative research on sensitive topics, on the researchers themselves. There is increasing recognition that undertaking qualitative research can pose many challenges for researchers. Dickson-Swift et al (2009) interviewed 30 qualitative researchers who identified the following emotional challenges: “issues relating to rapport development, use of researcher self-disclosure, listening to untold stories, feelings of guilt and vulnerability, leaving the research relationship and researcher exhaustion”. Other research in the area has identified similar issues, as well as challenges related to the maintaining of boundaries (with research participants), developing friendships (also with research participants), reflexivity, managing emotions, emotional and physical safety, and conflict over roles when researching sensitive topics.
The terms emotional labour and emotion work are often used interchangeably. The concept of ‘emotion work’ was first developed by Arlie Hochschild and in her book The Managed Heart (1983). Emotion work is generally used to refer to the work involved in ‘dealing with other people’s emotions’ (James, 1989: 16). Based on their findings, Dickson-Swift et al argue that for qualitative researchers, their emotional and cognitive functions are inseparable from each other and that emotions are central to the research process. They advocate for the acknowledgement of researchers undertaking emotion work in research and suggest a range of avenues to enable a safe space for qualitative researchers to explore the emotional nature of their work. These include informal support strategies such as self-care and peer support as well as more formal strategies such as supervision and therapeutic support.
As a working mum, one of my necessary skills (or survival strategies) is my ability to wear multiple hats. In the space of half a day I can be the nurturing, baking mum, packing lunch boxes and driving needy kids to school; grabbing groceries whilst simultaneously meal planning for the week; on the phone berating Telstra for overcharging on the mobile bill (yet again); and then once home, I’m the lovely neighbour to the old lady next door - fixing her TV remote (oh and not to mention having checked my partners moles that morning, and also listening to an emotional friend on the phone, who is going through a separation, on the way home from the school drop-off). And then finally, I arrive at my desk… as feminist qualitative researcher.
I used to think that exercise was the first thing to go, to be squeezed out of my over-subscribed week. But more ubiquitously, I think it is the emotional labour that accompanies much of my paid work that is the first to go – and often it goes unaccounted for. While not exercising may eventually show up in feeling sluggish, or some extra flab here and there. Not doing the processing work that has been found to accompany much qualitative research (on sensitive topics) tends to more subtly manifest, as burn out – slow and quiet burn out. The sneaking up of cynicism – very quietly replacing my once impenetrable optimism. I have watched this happen to researchers further down the road than I, the ones whose knowledge on a particular issue is vast as an ocean, but they quite frankly just couldn’t give a shit about it anymore. This has been referred to as ‘desensitisation’ – where ‘the extraordinary can become ‘bizarrely ordinary’ (Dickson-Swift et al, 2007, 341).
As a practitioner of what Sara Ahmed terms ‘diversity work’, making the space to process, digest and reflect is becoming an increasingly important part of my practice as a feminist qualitative researcher, particularly in the area of gender and sexuality. This is a trade in which, in the words of Critical Disability Studies scholar Jijian Voronka (2016), the work ‘is hard to do, and we have much to lose’. This work involves entering the lives of others, sometimes for an extended period of time, often just for a one-off encounter. In such an encounter we must do the work of building-rapport, “to facilitate participant disclosure” (Dickson-Seift et al, 2009). We set about establishing a safe space for the participant. Essentially, we ask a stranger to trust us with their story. Sometimes these stories are untold stories, and so we become ‘a secret-keeper’ (Dickson-Swift et al, 2009). Associated with the role of ‘secret-keeper’ is the possibility that we may carry research stories around with us, which may be detrimental to our emotional well being (Warr, 2004). To facilitate building rapport, researcher self-disclosure is often employed. In order to ‘level the playing field’ with a participant, we may share something of ourselves, perhaps becoming vulnerable with the participant. Qualitative interviewing on sensitive topics is the kind of work where a disclosure of sexual assault can be a marker of well-built rapport with an interviewee. It could also be a marker of an interviewee presenting with complex trauma. Either way there is associated work to be done on our part to process these aspects of our interview-interviewee interactions.
Not long ago I finished writing a chapter for my PhD, on young women’s experiences of negotiating sexual consent. Whilst my intention was for it not to be bleak, the end result was such. The day after I completed that chapter, I sat down to do a day of work for my employer at the time. It entailed four hours of reading through multiple reports of abuse - including some detailed first-hand accounts. It was heavy. In the past, I most likely would’ve finished that work, gotten up from my desk, brought in a load of washing and then hopped into the car to collect my kids from school - possibly calling that emotional friend going through a separation on the way there. But this time, on Monday, I got up and I went for a walk. Not an exercise walk. Not a dog walk. Just a walk for the sake of it. A walk to process. The kind of walk that French philosopher Albert Camus encourages one to go on:
“Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
I have recently moved to a very quiet place. I am the only one that lives on my street. When I walk down to the beach I am often the only one there. No one ‘drops in’ anymore, because I live too far out of town. And whilst I thought I might have found the solitude isolating, quite the contrary, I have noticed myself leaning into it.
Switched on companies are big on providing meaningful work to employees. And I love that. But without accompanying sustainable practices, that meaningful work has the potential to chew us up and spit us out. Last year I had my first taste of occupational burnout. It wasn’t pretty. As well as temporarily feeling as though I’d lost my sanity, I also lost my thirst for change, the energy to advocate for it (and the latter was the more disturbing of the two). I was experiencing what Sara Ahmed describes as being worn down and worn out from coming up against that which we are against.
One of my intentions for this year, moving forward, was to work hard and to work sustainably. Part of fulfilling that promise to myself has been to be more attentive to the emotional labour that accompanies my work. I wish I could say that I have made space each day for a walk. I haven’t. It crosses my mind around midday almost every day, but most of the time I choose to stay at my desk. It is difficult to trade productivity for reflection. But on the days that I have, my work has been richer for it.
Interested in undertaking my Researcher Wellbeing Training? Check it out here.
Further reading
Campbell, R. (2002) Emotionally Involved: The Impact of Researching Rape. New York: Routledge.
Dickson-Swift, V., James, E.L., Kippen, S. and Liamputtong, P. (2007) ‘Doing Sensitive Research: What Challenges Do Qualitative Researchers Face?’, Qualitative Research 7(3): 327–53.
Dickson-Swift, V., James, E.L., Kippen, S. and Liamputtong, P. (2009) ‘Researching sensitive topics: qualitative research as emotion work’, Qualitative Research 9(1): 61–79.
Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
A number of researchers have written reflectively about their own experiences of researching sensitive topics (Burr, 1995; Cannon, 1992; Darlington and Scott, 2002; Ferguson, 2003; Gair, 2002; Harris and Huntington, 2001; Hubbard et al., 2001; Kitson et al., 1996; McCosker et al., 2001; Melrose, 2002; Rosenblatt, 2001; Warr, 2004).