When emotions count in construction of interview data

This article highlights the significance of a methodology that includes the emotions as an integral element in the construction and analysis of data. The research question is: how can an emotional self-awareness of the researcher on data contribute towards understanding and knowledge. The objective is to display how reflections on the emotions of the researchers provide increased depth of the construction of the data and the topic studied. The empirical data have been obtained from two PhD projects on child and family contact with child protection authorities in Norway. The sampled material derives from situations in the interviews that particularly affected us emotionally and which we reflected on several years after the interviews took place. Through a re-analysis of the interview process, we display how the researchers constructed the data and how we, in the original research, overlooked important questions. Our analytical approach in the original project as in this re-analysis is constructivist interactionism. For the re-analysis, we both draw on the epistemology of emotion and the concept ‘account’. The article contributes to the development of methods by demonstrating how analysis might be made more reflective and transparent by taking the emotions of the researcher into account. The implication for practice is that we recommend a ‘re-consideration’ of data when one is emotionally aroused, and also to engage associates in the analysis.