Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants’ Emotions

• Published in: The American political science review Vol. 117; no. 4; pp. 1241 - 1254
• Main Author: PEARLMAN, WENDY
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.11.2023
• Subjects: Appreciation; Behavioral Science Research; Behavioral Sciences; Data collection; Economic conditions; Emotional experiences; Emotional Response; Emotions; Ethics; Ethnography; Human subjects; Inferences; Political activism; Political science; Psychological Patterns; Psychological trauma; Research ethics; Research subjects; Researchers; Resistance (Psychology); Review boards; Stimuli; Tracking; Validity; Voter fraud
• ISSN: 0003-0554; 1537-5943
• DOI: 10.1017/S0003055422001253

Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions’ larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sensibility sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection. Ethically, it supplements Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit. It thereby encourages thinking not only about emotional harm but also about emotions apart from harm and about emotional harms apart from trauma and vulnerability. I operationalize emotional sensibility by tracking four dimensions of research that affect participants’ emotions: the content of research, the context in which research occurs, researchers’ positionality, and researchers’ conduct.