Researcher Emotions: A Way Into The Experiences of Frail Older People

This paper explores the importance of the researcher's emotional experience in practice-near research. It details a journey towards positioning researcher emotions within a doctoral project exploring the everyday stories of older people deemed frail. Data from the experiences of interviewing and analysing the story of one couple are used to exemplify the emergent method. The method combines the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method with the psychoanalytically informed Tavistock Observation Method. The paper details the utilisation of the method and the frame it gives the researcher to move beyond the purely text based, cognitive responses of participant and researcher, to the less rational, and unspoken aspects of the research encounter. The paper argues that the emotional experiences of the researcher as well as the participant are important data in understanding the experience of 'being frail'. However, there is the need for an over-arching theoretical framework to give validity to these emotional processes. It argues that psychoanalytical approaches, which emphasise the quality of the emotions experienced and the internal psychological processes which mediate social experience, are helpful in underpinning both methodology and methods of practice-near research.