Acknowledging emotional input

The separation of mind, body and emotion, introduced by Descartes in the mid-17th century and now largely discredited by neuroscience, lives on within marketing research. Opinion, feeling and emotion are concealed inputs; we often ignore them, although they’re involved in every decision we make. But this is changing.

Increasingly, emotional experience is acknowledged as a valid input to research. Our opinions are not random or irrelevant. They arise in response to the interaction with our research participants, our clients, our past experiences. These interactions provoke feelings in us and we pick up the feelings of others; anxiety, embarrassment, the unexpected silence, which need to be understood and treated as part of the data. They are critical to the research process, which is as much experiential and emotional as cerebral. And I am talking here about the emotional climate within our own and client organisations as well as in relation to research participants.

Qualitative researchers have always accepted the importance of emotion in research. By openly acknowledging it, however, we broaden the scope of the research process; it becomes closer to real life and so enables more relevant learning.

Knowledge is all around

When we talk about integrating research from different sources, we usually mean marrying up respectable forms of research input, such as desk research, databases, qualitative and quantitative research. This is not what I mean here.

I am talking about the researcher – along with everyone else involved in the project – keeping their eyes and ears open and gathering clues and inspiration wherever it is to be found. This could be in newspapers, in idle conversation, in past work, in sudden inspiration. Data is all around, if we can recognise it, connect with it and allow it to feed our thinking – plus have the confidence to treat it as valid research input.