With feeling: Writing emotion into counselling and psychotherapy research

Abstract

Counsellors and psychotherapists bring unique knowledge to the field of research about the necessity for empathic connection to access participants’ lived experience, and about the co-construction of knowledge by participant and researcher. The current study formed part of a broader study of the professional identity of social workers as counsellors and psychotherapists and the development of their practice-based wisdom. Specifically, this study explored social workers’ narratives about critical incidents in their practice with particular reference to analysing the emotional experience of practitioners and the emotional response of the researcher. The sample comprised 18 clinical social workers who practised as therapists. They were purposively selected from professional associations and networks. Two semi-structured one-hour interviews were conducted with each participant, using professional biography and critical incident interviewing techniques. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the NVivo software program, which facilitates a grounded theory qualitative analysis. The findings presented are from analysis of two participants’ interviews, which yielded rich emotional content in relation to both participant and researcher. The study concludes that revealing the researcher's identificatory processes, resulting from participants’ narratives, leads to a more truthful and accountable description of data collection and analysis in qualitative research and highlights how the researcher co-constructs the data during data collection and analysis. This article advocates accepting subjectivity as an inevitable aspect of research and argues for the need to write subjectivity into research reports.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• researcher role
• reflexivity
• qualitative