Emotions and Fieldwork Quotes

“We must do the impossible and start before we begin. Before making that first phone call or visit, freewrite (see Elbow, 1981): Write fast and furiously without worrying about spelling or grammar or coherence. Ask yourself, What images do I hold of the people and the place I am about to study and how do I feel about those images? How did I come to study this setting at this time?
Ask yourself about the needs you expect this setting to fulfill: Do I have an axe to grind? Do I have a mission? Am I looking for a cause or a community? Do I expect this study to help me resolve personal problems? Am I hoping to create a different self? What political assumptions do I have? What kinds of setting activities or subgroups might I avoid or discount because of who I am or what I believe?”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“[…] a student in our class asked disdainfully why quantitative methodologists do not openly criticize qualitative methods. He scoffed, 'They don't even mention it. But in courses in qualitative methods, quantitative methods always come up.'
[…]
I pointed out that the lack of critical remarks and the absence of any mention of qualitative research in 'methods' courses indicate the hegemony of the quantitative approach. Were not his statistics professors making a strong statement about the place of qualitative methods by omitting them entirely? Qualitative researchers, then, have to legitimate their perspective to students in order to break the methodological silence coming from the other side.”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“Fieldworkers must build a community of sentiment, with local and long-distance members, that opposes the competitive individualism of academia. The lone scholar is a sociological impossibility. Our “individual” works rely on language, literatures, and feedback from colleagues (Becker, 1986).”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“We will probably have the nagging feeling that we are not doing things right. This is good because confronting our negative feelings and our fear of incompetence can help us begin analysis.”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“Instead of doing emotion work, we suggest that fieldworkers become more aware of their feelings and use them as data. As Arlie Hochschild (1983) argued, we can use feelings as clues [...]”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“It is unfortunate that some of us worry about losing data but not our thoughts about the data. If we believed in the premises of sociology—that interaction is patterned, that people share meanings, beliefs, and behaviors—then we would trust that the patterns we missed while we were writing will still be there when we return to the field. We are more likely to forget our insights into what we observed.”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“We cannot achieve immersion without bringing our subjectivity into play.”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork