"Knowing (the affective family) well" : moving beyond the ethical concerns / Anagha Tambe.
Any qualitative social research, especially research on family and relational living, is infused with emotion, even when its theme is not explicitly sensitive and emotionally intensive. Yet, surfacing of emotions in the research process is often treated as risky for research participants, raising et...
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| Format: | Ebook |
| Language: | English |
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London :
SAGE Publications Ltd,
2024.
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| Series: | SAGE Research methods: diversifying and decolonizing research
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | SAGE |
| Summary: | Any qualitative social research, especially research on family and relational living, is infused with emotion, even when its theme is not explicitly sensitive and emotionally intensive. Yet, surfacing of emotions in the research process is often treated as risky for research participants, raising ethical concerns and asking for the practice of empathy and care. However, interviewing is an epistemic process of making meanings cognitively and affectively as well as a social interaction embedded in power. The practice of responsible knowing therefore implies not just ethical but also epistemic responsibility. The ethical awareness often entails dodging analysis of intangible affective traces of the interview as overinterpretation and tidying up emotional messiness of the narratives through neat thematic analysis and tight categorization to produce overarching generalizations from the disparate interpretations of the data. This case study therefore urges for recognizing epistemic responsibility in the academic community to ensure epistemological rigor in interpreting and writing affective narratives. This would enable producing multilayered accounts of complex and conflicting emotional/social worlds such as family. We revisit our qualitative research study unpacking family as the site of cultural socialization of young people and illuminate how our thematic focus on the normative aspects of family displaced our attention from the interiority and affective dimensions of it. Our research process was muddled with the emotional dynamics of the family, and this is an attempt to reflect on the shutting down of the epistemological possibilities of the unsettling affective encounters in our research. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| ISBN: | 9781529691153 152969115X |