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Purpose – This chapter explores the relational and emotional lifeworlds of qualitative interviews. The chapter documents the ways in which I have negotiated the sharing of traumatic accounts without being able to fix or repair their causes, and how I struggled to listen to recollections without trying to appropriate, accentuate or ameliorate their affective resonances.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter focuses on one case from a four-year study with mothers and their daughters in a marginalised area of South Wales, UK. The study drew on visual and creative methods of data production, including mapping, collage, photoelicitation and timelines, which were accompanied by in-depth elicitation interviews.

Findings – The chapter illustrates the usefulness of reflecting on emotions to understand the communication of trauma, and its emotional impacts on research relationships both within and beyond the field.

Originality/Value – The chapter builds on earlier work that has attempted to consider in detail the nature of the interaction between researchers and participants. It argues that psychoanalytically informed frames of analysis can engender a more nuanced understanding of the relationality and emotionality of qualitative research; particularly when topics are hard to speak of and hard to bear.

This chapter reflects on an undergraduate dissertation study that explored the idea of school choice with parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds who were all connected through their son’s football team. The project became ‘lost’ when the author’s doctoral work took a different direction; however, this loss was not complete as there was an extended physical engagement with the research site, a social tapestry of ongoing connections, and a psychological and intellectual reflexive process that has both influenced and guided the author’s future studies and writing. The original study involved individual interviews with the boys’ parents, discussing the transition from junior school to secondary school. As well as some informal ethnographic observations of the football games and wider community activities. It employed the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to explore the extent to which parents have a ‘choice’ about their children’s education. The findings of the study supported the premise that there are pervasive forms of classed based inequalities in education and the idea of a ‘fallacy’ of school choice. The theoretical frameworks applied highlighted the ways in which ‘choice’ is constrained in relation to finance, place, class and ideas of belonging and community. The ‘lost’ project would have taken a longitudinal approach to follow the journeys of boys using multimodal forms of ethnography. The chapter argues that even though projects may be lost, they are not forgotten. It details how the author’s ideas for following up the football boys and the findings of the initial study have done, and continue to permeate the author’s thinking, research and understandings of place, class, stigma, constraint and the absence of choice for individuals and communities.

Motherhood and mothering are conceived in relation to classed hierarchies through which those living in poverty become characterized by “otherhood” and “othering.” This positioning leaves them vulnerable to overt and indirect forms of criticism, surveillance, and policing from family, friends, professionals, and strangers; against a background of demonization of particular types of mothers and mothering practices in the wider mediascape. This chapter draws on 3 studies, involving 28 participants, which explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The participants all resided in low-income locales. Many participants had resided in homeless hostels and mother and baby units before being placed in local authority housing or low-grade rented accommodation. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography, including photoelicitation, timelines, emotion stickers, collage, and sandboxing. Participants discussed different forms of surveillance where other people were characterized as “watching what I’m doing, watching how I’m doing it.” These forms of watching ranged from the structured policing encountered in mother-and-baby units to more informal comments from passers-by or passengers on a bus journey; and an awareness of how mothers in state housing are depicted in the media. These interactions were sometimes met with resistance. At other times, they were simply another incident that participants negotiated in a growing tapestry of disrespect and devaluation. This chapter argues that these discourses demonize and alienate mothers living on the margins, making already difficult journeys a constant struggle in the moral maze of contemporary motherhood and its accompanying conceptualizations of “otherhood.”

Purpose – Drawing on a study of data extracts ‘mined’ from the Internet without interaction with the author, this chapter considers the emotional implications of online ‘participant absent research’. The chapter argues that researchers should reflexively consider the ways in which data collection techniques framed as ‘passive’ actively impact on researchers’ emotional lifeworlds. Consequently, it is important to ensure that researchers are adequately prepared and supported.

Methodology/Approach – The data introduced in this chapter were constructed around a single case study. This example documents an incident where a woman was asked to leave a sports shop in the UK because she was breastfeeding. Not allowing breastfeeding within a business is illegal in the UK, and this case resulted in a protest. The study involved an analysis of user-generated data from an online news site and Twitter.

Findings – Drawing on field notes and conversations with colleagues, the chapter explores the value of reflexivity for successfully managing researchers’ emotional responses to disturbing data during the process of analysis.

Originality/Value – Whilst the role of emotion is often considered as part of ethnographic practice in studies utilising face-to-face encounters, it is underexplored in the online domain. This chapter presents, through a detailed example, a reflective account of the emotion work required in participant absent research, and offers strategies to reflexively manage emotions.

Purpose – This chapter will discuss how the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, for example, being a sibling and losing a sibling. It explores the researcher’s emotional experience when working with children and their families, with a specific focus on the influence of the researcher presence and the sibling equilibrium.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on the dramaturgical social interactions encountered in qualitative research which explored the experiences of siblings living in the context of cystic fibrosis. The study uses narrative inquiry and creative participatory methods to elicit sibling stories and provides insight into their worlds.

Findings – The chapter reflects on specific situations encountered on entering, engaging in and leaving the field, which had a significant emotional impact. Two sibling vignettes will be presented along with a discussion of how reflective metaphorical expression can be applied as a method of processing and coping with the research context.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, and that reflective metaphorical expression can be used as a strategy to process thoughts and gain greater understanding of a situation as well as to provide an emotional release for the researcher. It also suggests that conducting research over a longer time period, as opposed to one visit, can be beneficial in terms of participant and researcher emotional transition.

This chapter discusses what the working practices and professionalism of sports lecturers can tell us about the challenges of professionalism in further education (FE). This chapter draws on Jake's doctoral research in which he interviewed five sports lecturers working in FE colleges in England, about their identities and practices. In this chapter, Jake talks about his own experiences as a sports lecturer in FE and how his increasing disillusionment with his role led him to undertake doctoral research in this field. We explore constructions of professionalism within FE, and we show that through a process Jake identified and labelled as ‘competitive mediation’, the sports lecturers he interviewed used their experiences as elite sports people to navigate the highly performative environments in which they were working. The positives and negatives of using this strategy for them, their learners and wider society are explored in this chapter. We suggest that although Jake's research focused specifically on sports lecturers in FE settings, his insights can be applied more widely, we reflect on the importance of considering the impact our own diverse lived experiences may have on our sense of professionalism as researchers and practitioners.

To outline the kinds of problems and dilemmas which researchers might experience in professional sports settings and to highlight the way in which gender might shape those experiences.

An ethnography of professional football.

Few social researchers have managed to breach the institutional bounds of professional sport and fewer still have carried out ethnographic work within this context. Gender inevitably impacts the complexion of sporting domains and this manifests itself in everyday behaviours and sub-cultural practices. Qualitative research has the potential to uncover the nuances of individual and collective behaviours within such settings and to shed light upon the ways in which gender relations shape the contours of institutional life.

To situate current debate around methods within wider discussions of gender and social research and against the backdrop of theoretical shifts in the conceptualisation of masculinities.

Purpose – This chapter critically engages with a positively oriented emotional reflexivity with the aim of improving inclusivity in bereavement research.

Methodology/Approach – The heartfelt positivity methodology intentionally creates positivity through the everyday practices of academic research. In this chapter, emotional reflexivity is guided by the heartfelt positivity methodology to identify and learn from collaborators’ emotions. It focuses on collaborators whose involvement in the academic community falls beyond that of the immediate research team at different stages of bereavement research.

Findings – The emotions of collaborators involved in bereavement research have been overlooked, yet their inclusion reveals a significant potential for the sanctioning of bereaved mothers’ potential participation in bereavement-focused research or breastmilk donation programmes. Key learnings that may be applied to conducting future bereavement research are (i) the potential for collaborators to also be bereaved parents (ii) the continued need to strive for the inclusion of bereaved parents in research and (iii) to extend the methodological principle of emotional reflexivity to include research collaborators when researching emotionally sensitive topics.

Originality/Value – This chapter argues that bereaved mothers’ knowledge and practices of thriving in hard times can either be fostered or derailed at different stages of the research cycle depending on which narratives frame human suffering. For researchers and collaborators, emotional reflexivity is crucial to inclusive research practices and knowledge translation.

Purpose – This chapter details the collaborative investigation of a neuroscientist and a literature scholar into whether reading literature increases empathy in health professionals, pre-health professionals and students outside of health care. It also reflects on the role of different epistemologies that inform researchers’ approaches, and muses on how ethnicity, sexual orientation and class inform research and teaching

Methodology/Approach – Students watched or read Margaret Edson’s play W;t and were asked if the medical drama increased their sense of appropriate empathy in medical encounters. The original research employed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, electromyography and galvanic skin response to measure physiological markers of empathy. These results were then compared to the self-reflection of participants to determine whether or not the physiological responses mirrored the self-report. The reflections on how emotion impacted the research were primarily narrative essay-based accompanied by feminist other literary theories.

Findings – All participants in the original study reported an increase in empathy after reading or viewing the play. This affect was even stronger when they viewed a live performance. The researchers determined that the role that their ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and class needed further study, perhaps with different pieces of literature.

Originality/Value – This chapter reflects the interdisciplinary and epistemological challenges of two researchers from very different backgrounds and training and investigates the relationship between reading, physiological empathy and perceptions of empathy. It considers the difficult and controversial challenges to quantifying emotions and the role emotions play in academic collaboration.

To understand how research-participant relationships are formed in research settings through experiences and analyses of content-specific gendered identity practices.

I draw upon a school-based ethnographically informed study exploring the construction of masculinities among white working-class boys in three schools in South London, United Kingdom between 2009 and 2011. To access participants’ perceptions, I used a methodology of observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and visual methods.

Themes of gendered embodiment, physicality and performance play a part in the formation of relationships in this study. Furthermore, such themes play a role – to varying degrees – in researcher-participant relationship-building. In understanding relationship-building practices, I make connections to my own reflexivity accounting for the multifaceted nature of identities, lifestyles and perspectives present in researcher-participant interaction.

Throughout the fieldwork, constructs of gender, nationality and class all contributed to how relationships were built. In navigating the power relations innate to all relationship-building, I discuss how I capitalised on my outsider status in terms of nationality to neutralise certain elements of class and gender that were normative to my participants, but, simultaneously, draw upon my insider status in terms of knowledge of the locale, humour and clothing which contributed greatly to how the relationships were constructed and maintained.