Mixed and messy researching – responding to emotional and emotionless data

Overview:

This session designed as a workshop for postgraduate students will explore, from a position of experience, some of the messiness in (primarily) qualitative health fieldwork. Drawing on recent research conducted with NHS Scotland, we will explore the complications inherent in conducting politically, socially and emotionally sensitive interviews – and ways to manage both the anticipated and unanticipated emotional work involved. We will then contrast this to less engaging and seemingly emotionless data; policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, workforce statistics, reflecting on how to sustain enthusiasm for the analysis of long, often dull documents. Lastly, we will discuss how to synthesise these datasets for publication.

Jen will deliver this workshop will be a relaxed and reassuring session that explores in equal measure experiences of data collection and analysis going well, as well as when it does not go as planned. We can discuss and reflect issues in the field and help each mitigate them.

Biography

Jen Remnant is Chair of the British Sociological Association and a Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Centre for Employment Research in Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde. The Centre’s purpose is to produce high quality academic research for policy use in public, private and voluntary sectors focusing on workplace innovation; fair work and job quality; employability; and employment regulation and equality.

Jen’s interests are focused on the intersection of health and work. She is interested in how ill-health is conceptualised in relation to paid labour, and how employers (mis)manage disabled and long-term ill employees at work, especially in workforces that provide health and social care. This includes understanding the influence of organisational policy on the experiences of ill employees, labour market changes, welfare reform, workplace environments, professionalisation and symptom management.

Jen’s research has been funded by the THIS Institute, ESRC, The Addenbrookes Trust, CIPD and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness.

Image credit: Bruno Girin (Creative Commons Licence CC BY-SA 2.0)

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