Mapping Emotional Labor in Feminist Social Work Qualitative Inquiry: Strengthening the Social Impact of Research and Doctoral Education

Background and Purpose:

Feminist social work scholars often engage in very difficult qualitative work in which they bear witness to participants’ pain and suffering. This is especially true of scholars who investigate the experiences of intimate partner and sexual violence survivors who not only endure abuse from their partners but are also often harmed by the very systems designed to support them. Grounded in a critical feminist perspective, the purpose of this study was to assess the nature and impact of researcher’ emotional labor required to engage in effective qualitative research with women who had domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories and were legal systems identified as offenders. The findings can be used to better prepare social work researchers for qualitative inquiry with marginalized groups.

Methods:

Over three years the author investigated the lives of 33 diverse cisgender women who were court-ordered to antiviolence intervention for their use of force or alleged use of force. Most of the women had domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories. The investigation included 51 recorded and transcribed semi-ethnographic life-history interviews, 5 go-along interviews, and 4 middle-position interviews. Extensive fieldnotes were taken before and after researcher-respondent interactions. Interview transcripts and field notes were compiled and analyzed for emotional labor themes using Dedoose 8.0.42. Iterative open coding entailed compiling a master list of general deductive and inductive codes as well as evolving themes.

Results:

Researcher emotional labor was required in a combination of researcher thinking and researcher feeling tasks. The thinking and feeling tasks manifested in three main settings: 1) the interview’s framework and infrastructure (e.g., extensive interview scheduling process, placement and management of recording devices, how and when questions were asked); 2) researcher-respondent in-person interactions (e.g., how the researcher promoted the respondent’s safety, researcher-respondent co-creation of explicitly and implicitly negotiated power dynamics, researcher supported respondent confidentiality); and 3) the researcher’s self-focus (e.g., the researcher’s internal dialogue and somatic reactions throughout the research and analysis process).

Conclusions and Implications:

The complex interplay of a researcher’s thoughts and feelings infuse all aspects of feminist qualitative social work inquiry with participants who have experienced harm, violence, and trauma. Mapping emotional labor tasks brings legibility to an integral component of this methodology. Bringing legibility to emotional labor has far reaching implications for strengthening the social impact of social work research, collaboration among researchers, co-constructing research with respondents, and improving social work education for doctoral students.