The emotional texture of knowing

I cried this morning because I realised a piece of research I've been working on for months is nearly finished.

I've done this before. The last time I completed a substantial qualitative analysis, I cried then too.

I've been trying to work out what that is about.

It isn't certainty. I don't suddenly think I've found the answer. If anything, doing qualitative research has made me more comfortable with the idea that there are always other interpretations, other contexts, other questions you could ask.

And it isn't just relief.

It's closer to grief.

For months, this inquiry has been a companion. It has been somewhere I go to think.

I've carried interviews around in my head. I've drawn things, pulled explanations apart, put them back together differently, talked emerging ideas through with people, become attached to interpretations and then had to abandon them.

I've loved the unfinishedness of it.

And then, gradually, something changes. The analysis starts to hold. Not because all the contradictions disappear, but because you can understand more of the pattern and the variation.

At exactly the point I'm beginning to see that the work might have an impact, that people might actually use it, I also have to give up my private relationship with the question.

There's something beautiful about that. And something sad.

It has made me think again about Barbara Fredrickson's work on broaden-and-build, which I've been interested in for years.

One of the things I've always found interesting about that work isn't simply the idea that positive emotions are good for us. It's the idea that emotions can change what becomes available to us: interest creates an urge to explore; positive affect can broaden repertoires of thought and action.

The more I research, though, the more interested I am in the whole emotional texture of inquiry, including the less comfortable bits.

Curiosity pulls me towards something I don't understand.

Surprise interrupts what I thought I knew.

Confusion keeps something unresolved.

Excitement makes me want to follow a connection.

Frustration sometimes tells me that the conceptual structure I'm using isn't doing enough work.

Defensiveness when someone challenges an emerging interpretation can make me ask an uncomfortable but useful question: what exactly am I defending here?

And now grief seems to be marking another change in my relationship with the knowledge: this inquiry no longer needs to remain as open as it has been.

None of those emotions tells me whether my analysis is right.

That's important.

Emotion isn't evidence. But perhaps it can be reflexive material.

We still sometimes talk as though thinking and feeling are separable processes: the researcher does the intellectual work, while emotion happens somewhere alongside it and needs to be acknowledged or managed.

I'm increasingly unconvinced by that account.

What interests me isn't simply how did this research make me feel?

It's:

What might the changing emotional texture of an inquiry tell me about my changing relationship with what I think I know?

I've started wondering whether I'd like to use an emotion wheel during my next substantial research project.

Not as a wellbeing exercise. And definitely not as a way of deciding whether an interpretation is true.

I'd use it alongside analytical memoing.

What am I feeling about this research at this point?

What is the feeling directed towards?

What does it make me want to move towards, avoid, resolve, defend or keep open?

And has that changed?

I think the longitudinal bit might be particularly interesting.

What happens when something I initially experience as threatening becomes interesting?

When anxiety about not knowing becomes pleasure in uncertainty?

When excitement about a beautiful explanation becomes suspicion of its neatness?

When defensiveness eventually becomes gratitude because somebody's challenge made the analysis better?

Perhaps there is an emotional history of an inquiry running alongside its methodological and analytical history.

And perhaps there is something here for research culture too.

We quite rightly worry about researcher wellbeing. But the emotional conditions in which research happens might also be epistemic conditions.

What happens to the range of things we can think about in environments where being wrong is dangerous?

What happens to curiosity when uncertainty has to be disguised?

What kinds of connections become possible when people feel able to play with an idea before they can defend it?

I don't think the answer is that researchers need to feel positive all the time. Quite the opposite. Doubt, discomfort, frustration and uncertainty may all have something to contribute.

I think I'm becoming interested in emotional range as part of the craft of inquiry and in our ability to notice it without either treating emotion as truth or pretending we can remove it from knowing.

For now, though, I'm sitting with grief.

I have spent months wanting this research to become mature enough to leave me.

Now that it has, I discover that part of me doesn't want it to go.

We become attached to questions while doing the work required to release their answers.