Dear all,

For those interested, I've just inserted a new section into today's version of the BNIM Quick Outline Sketch and, as usual, bits of other stuff there and in the BNIM Short Guide. 

Best wishes from a sunny/cloudy climate-changing Aveyron in Central France

Tom

New section 3.3.  in BNIM Quick Outline Sketch 70  (renumbered)

 

3.3. Constantly noting the emotional subtext and unsaid of the intersubjectivity of the interview and its unfolding interpretation

Any interview should be understood as a two-sided ‘inter-view’, or perhaps one should say two ‘inter partial views, inter-partial concealments’: concealments from the other, concealments from oneself. On both sides.

If  it is emotions that puts the true selves of the interview couple in motion, then it is of the utmost importance that these normally pretty-covert emotions and their consequences be made detectable. This requires constant observation and self-observation, and constant making of subjective notes before during and after the interview, as well as before during and after the different stages of  processing the data and interpreting the interview material.

Unless the unsaid is at least partly said in ongoing self-noting and self-observation, the unsaid will remain unseen and unthought and vanish from memory and be unusable.

In sociology and in the historical sciences, a notion that starts to capture this requirement of constant noting to go beyond the words is that of ‘reflexivity’. In psychology and in the psychodynamic sciences, a key notion is that of ‘transference and countertransference’.

There are other notions (e.g. ‘Theorical memo-ising’ of grounded theorising in the school of Glazer and Strauss) that do the same work of insisting on going beyond the words of the interaction into the subtext and the unsaid in order to generate constant ‘researcher notes’ that can be used later to develop greater insight into the unsaid and the previously barely-detectable virtually-unthought.

The unsaid of the interview can only be accessed later by the constant subjective noting of the researching interviewer and interpreter. And a leading, if not the leading, edge of the unsaid lies in the mostly-concealed and often-disguised emotions and feelings of the two parties.

In the interview and interpretation processes, and outside them, shifting and moving emotionalities are central to dated, situated, defended, and evolving/ deciding situated subjectivities.

This involves particular attention to our own defensiveness, our own hotspots and blindspots, those shared in  our culture or discipline and those particular to our own  history and aspirations, in  our situatedness. This involves detailed noting of our subjective movements behind our ‘objective researcher’ exteriors. Constant private note-making and observation (subjective and inter-subjective)  is key to this.

As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu remarked We must become much more objective about our own subjectivity!