How to turn the unspeakable emotions visible in qualitative studies? A data analysis reflection

With the study of emotions gaining more attention in the domain of social science, the important question of how we should understand and interpret emotions in the data analysis process also emerges. This article follows Sara Ahmed’s discussion of emotions, whose work highlights that emotions are deeply mingled and constructed by certain social and political power structures. This epistemological position echoes back to the qualitative foundation, which is focused on grasping and portraying the participants’ social context to uncover underlying power relationships.
Therefore, the article tends to see the translation process as an effort to capture and understand the subtle emotions that vary in different cultural contexts. It highlights the interaction and construction fundamental nature of qualitative research and takes the role of the researcher into consideration. It views the researcher as a constant translator who crosses the power and cultural borders and visualizes the unspeakable part of the emotions of the researched.
This article also draws attention to an important aspect that is rarely discussed during the research process: the feelings that researchers might experience. It also needs to be kept in mind that because of the unspeakable and sometimes invisible nature of emotions, researchers may unconsciously fall into the “self-interpretation” plight, which ignores the complexity of different emotions from different subjects. The term “translation of emotions” was used as a thread going through the data analysis process, to answer the following questions: How do we capture and understand emotions as data we collected? How will the power dynamic between the researcher and the researched affect the way emotions are shown and presented during interviews and most importantly, how does the positionality of the researcher affect the analysis process and how do we eliminate the biases?