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  • Writer's pictureVictoria Redclift

The role of emotions whilst conducting semi-structured interviews by Fatima Rajina

Updated: Jul 28, 2020

Emotions. They’re not something you can really switch off. When I was preparing to do my fieldwork for my PhD I was instructed, as per usual, to remain ‘objective’ and not get ‘too involved’. The latter comment implied I should keep my distance from the research participants on my fieldwork in order to retrieve the most amount of data without ‘imposing’ myself. Surely, my presence itself will influence the outcome anyway? It was once I started working on these projects that I was told it was okay to be fluid and flexible. It was okay to go ‘off-script’ during an interview – although it is supposed to be a semi-structured interview anyway(!) – and give the research participants authority to also guide the interview.


One of the reasons I was hoping to write this piece was because of a few encounters I have had with some research participants whist working on both the projects. One interview, in particular, moved me so much that it inspired me to (finally!) write this particular piece. These were moments where I suddenly found myself really caught up with the research participants’ emotions. I could feel their emotions and I felt them intensely when they shared gruesome memories from their lives. In these instances I felt awkward because I was always taken back to the workshops where I was told to remain as distant as possible in order not to manipulate or induce any emotions. Alas, I was to experience something quite transformative, personally as well as a researcher who will, hopefully, continue to conduct qualitative research in the future.


What left me speechless during some of these interviews was how much people confided in me about different phases in their lives, which in other contexts would be perceived as information you only share with your close circle of friends. I was left feeling overwhelmed and, at times, wondering how can one can trust a stranger this much? During one interview I witnessed a mother break down in front of her daughter while she was sharing her love for Bangladesh and what the country meant to her. I lost myself in her descriptions of her love that I found myself crying with her. Her daughter also started crying but left the room to grab some tissue for us. On another occasion, I interviewed an adult male in his 30s and once he started reflecting upon his mother’s dedication and how much she sacrificed for her children he started crying. We were in a public place and I asked him if he wanted me to switch off the voice-recorder but he didn’t respond. I grabbed him some tissue and I sat quietly, looking down and blankly staring at my shoes. I was overwhelmed because this was the first time an adult male I have interviewed was crying in front of me. I asked him what triggered his emotions and he then went into detail about how his mother, like many other Bangladeshi women in the East End at the time, were sewing t-shirts, trousers and many other items in their homes on either Brother or Singer sewing machines to make some extra money for the household.


In addition to the two occurrences I have described above there were many more. One elderly Bengali aunty (in her 60s) started crying when she spoke about her husband, who deceased 8 years ago, and how much she missed his company. He did everything for her, so now that she was taking English lessons she felt she had missed out on so much but would have loved to have him around to support her in her new endeavours. One other interview involved an uncle, 60 years of age, to cry. He vividly described his experience of witnessing the West Pakistani army burning the villages near his and how he tried to escape the village with his relatives. In trying to escape and forcing his relatives out of the village to find a hiding place he realised his two grandfathers couldn’t move along with them because they were too frail. He then went back in and lit their hookahs for them and ran out, seeking safety for himself. He apologised for crying. I sat there in silence and, once again, looked down at my shoes and stared at them. I had tears rushing to my eyes, hoping to stream down my face but I managed to control myself and lifted my head to look at him again. He wiped his tears and explained how those memories still haunt him.


These are just some of the experiences I have had doing qualitative research. I am aware of the role of self-reflexivity in research and how it is vital in navigating one’s position as a researcher. However, one thing I was never quite prepared for was how to handle emotions or if I was ever allowed to express them in front of my research participants. Within academia emotions are sometimes frowned upon and perceived as not ‘scientific’ enough but what I have learnt from my time on these projects is that they are central to the research process and should be embraced rather than disregarded – they’re an asset, not a burden. How can this be possible when the very premise of qualitative research, particularly when pursuing topics such as immigration, racism,

transnationalism, citizenship, identity, and so on, involves many different layers of emotions. These various topics are driven and explored through people’s lived experiences, which, inevitably, are drawn from multifaceted emotional memories without which the data would surely be vacuous? Even if research participants aren’t crying in front of you you are still having to navigate emotions crucial to the individual’s narration because doing interviews involves listening to people sharing precious moments in their lives, which consequently enrich one’s study/research. Without people’s emotions I am not too sure if the data would be raw but most importantly it would simply take away the human element: emotions.

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