Qualitative inquiry with women in poverty in Mexico City: reflections on the emotional responses of a research team

Abstract

While conducting a qualitative inquiry involving in‐depth interviews on the perceptions of health risks within a group of profoundly poor urban families in the southern part of Mexico City, Martínez‐Salgado and her interdisciplinary team of women interviewers got involved in emotionally complex situations with the women participants in the study. In this article, Martínez‐Salgado reflects on the situations she and her research team encountered and on the emotional experiences they underwent doing this research. She discusses how a critical psychoanalytical perspective shaped the study, describes their fieldwork experiences, and addresses how the research team reacted to and coped with emotionally charged research situations. To conclude, the article addresses the importance of reflecting on and providing testimonies of the emotional aspects of doing qualitative research that documents the unfairness of the situation in which poor women and their families live.

Keywords:

• poverty
• collaborative interviewing
• fieldwork emotions
• critical psychoanalysis
• Mexico
• qualitative inquiry

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Rebeca Pereira, Luz María Vargas and Patricia González, the members of the research team, and Alejandro Córdova, our psychoanalytical advisor. I am also deeply grateful to Leslie Rebecca Bloom for her comments and support throughout the writing of this text. And I would like to thank the IJQSE anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and valuable suggestions to an earlier version of the document.

Notes

1. As the Spanish version of this World Bank document shows, experts in measuring poverty have classified it into three levels (Banco Mundial 2005). ‘Food poverty’ (pobreza alimentaria) is suffered by those living below the income levels required to satisfy minimal nutritional requirements. ‘Skills poverty’ (pobreza de capacidades) is experienced by those who have sufficient income to purchase basic foods but not education or health services. And ‘asset poverty’ (pobreza de patrimonio) is experienced by those whose income enables them to purchase basic foods and the most elementary health and education services, but not to cover housing, clothing and transport expenses. In real life, of course, families do not distribute their scant income this way and instead are obliged to develop highly ingenious strategies if they are to survive in the straitened circumstances to which they are condemned by such an unequal, unjust system of distribution.

2. The Mexico City metropolitan area is located in the Federal District and part of Mexico State, where just over half its total inhabitants reside.

3. The UNAM: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico).

4. An author linked to the work of the Frankfurt School (Jay 1991), and who spent part of his life in Mexico, where he exerted great influence over those that directed and taught at the UNAM Medicine Faculty.

5. The Hungarian ethnopsychoanalyst considered the founder of ethnopsychiatry.

6. As shown, for example, by the work of Krumer‐Nevo (2005) on how interpretations ‘from the outside’ lose sight of the context in which the lives of poor women take place.

7. Julia Kristeva, the renowned Bulgarian feminist and psychoanalyst writer considered by Elliott (2003, 123) as ‘a distinguished contemporary heir to the tradition of radical Freudian criticism, which flows through Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse to Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser and on to latter‐day figures like Slavoj Zizek.’

8. This is reminiscent of Lutrell’s (2003, 150–2) description of the pregnant girls she was studying when they asked for her affirmation and comments about their own identities and self‐making.

9. Which does not mean that we did not experience positive, kind, friendly feelings too.

10. Names and some details have been changed to preserve confidentiality.

11. I think that in my country this can be seen as an expression of these two fighting Mexicos described by Bonfil (2005) as el México profundo and el México imaginario.