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http://ssi.sagepub.com Everyday lives and extraordinary research methods

Jack Katz Social Science Information 2004; 43; 609 DOI: 10.1177/0539018404047707 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ssi.sagepub.com

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Trends and developments: research on emotions Courants et tendances: recherche sur les emotions Commentaries Commentaires Jack Katz

Everyday lives and extraordinary research methods

It is understandable that a survey questionnaire could seem to psychologists to be a device to study emotions in everyday life. Surveys take psychological research out of the articial limitations of experiments on undergraduate students in university laboratories. But in the sociological research tradition, survey methods have held a place analogous to the psychologists laboratory. To sociologists the study of anything as it exists in everyday life is likely to mean a move beyond survey methodology. Scherer et al. ask randomly selected respondents to report in their own written words on an event experienced yesterday that caused them to experience an emotion, and also to characterize the frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) of 14 listed emotions. Their survey also contains questions about respondents social characteristics and features of emotional situations, setting up correlation analyses. As a sociologist who has used naturalistic methods to describe and explain emotions, I nd event sampling and the time-sampling, experience-sampling or diary methods that have become popular recently (Reis and Gable, 2000) to be intriguing both for their
Social Science Information & 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 0539-0184 DOI: 10.1177/0539018404047707 Vol 43(4), pp. 609619; 047707

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unique contributions and for a shared indifference to how everyday life has been studied sociologically. Within sociologys history, studies of everyday life describe phenomena in all of four ways: (1) ethnographically, as the phenomena occur in their social context; (2) interactionally, as behavior is shaped by taking into account the response of others, whether copresent or anticipated; (3) diachronically, as they emerge and decline over time; and (4) with detailed attention to corporeal practices, which often can be described by participant observers or found in repeated inspections of videotapes, even when they escape the subjects awareness. Data-gathering and recording techniques can vary. In this tradition I have pursued a range of studies of emotions in everyday life (Katz, 1999), including: interviews, conducted by undergraduate students in a conversational manner, of Los Angeles drivers over 30 years of age, about their experiences in getting angry while driving, plus, when chance allowed, passenger/interviewer observations of angry driver/interviewees; videotapes I made of people as they reacted to funhouse mirrors at an amusement park in Paris; anonymous UCLA undergraduate self-reports and interviews I conducted over several years of experiences of shame; videotaped episodes of crying taken from US news shows, live coverage of awards ceremonies and sports competitions, and documentary anthropology lming, supplemented by recordings I made of events I came across in my everyday life in Los Angeles (at music recitals for 5-year-olds, at elementary school holiday shows, at Little League baseball games, at retirement parties, etc.); conversational interviews that I conducted, over a period of several years, of acquaintances experiences in crying, especially joyful crying; these interviews would usually start when I answered crying in response to questions about what I was working on; a police videotape of a six-hour interrogation in New Mexico, in which a murder suspect cried briey at two points; a videotape, taken from a Southern California pre-schools recordings, of a 3-year-old child whining for 5 minutes. As compared to surveys of emotional events, my naturalistic studies give no basis for quantitative generalizations. Naturalistic data are useful for ruling out rival hypotheses about the causal con-

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ditions of various emotions, but the explanation they serve is of universals what is true of all instances of joyful crying or road rage. Differences in the incidence and intensity of emotions as experienced by different types of people or demographic groups are appreciated, but as representatives of rival explanations that are negated. My data-gathering strategies are biased toward describing emotions that arise and disappear in brief episodes. Unlike time or experience sampling, emotional episodes speak weakly about situation-transcending dimensions of experience such as moods and dispositions. Like all research methods, conversational interviews, eld observations and even videotape will miss many of the nely shaded edges in which emotions emerge and fade away in the course of personal experience, as well as countless dimensions of the autobiographical resonances contained in emotionally provocative life situations. Chills often run in a bodily background before videotape can show eyes welling up. These forms of measurement error are no less disturbing because they are intrinsic to research. However formalized or exible, social-psychological research always functions as a surgical courier service for distant intellectual audiences, hastily cutting out and neatly packaging experiences that have taken subjects a messy lifetime to form. Yet there are distinctive advantages to the naturalistic approach to the study of everyday social life. They highlight the limitations of survey strategies for describing emotions. I nd four. 1. First, if the stain of artice motivates the move out of the laboratory, questionnaire surveys of everyday life are not a clean solution. For one thing, respondents, in lling out a questionnaire about yesterdays emotions, are inevitably aware that they are creating an image of themselves in the here and now of the research operation. Scherer et al. ask respondents to report an emotion they had experienced the day before and to describe the eliciting event and their reaction patterns. The selection of an emotion to report is a social act independent in time, place and anticipated implications of the emotions experienced on the prior day. For some people the reporting of negative emotions like anger will display an attractive capacity for self-criticism. For others a gay prole that helps sustain others optimism may be irresistible. To read the responses as transparent windows onto what was lived is to deny the independent reality of personal beliefs about how ones intimate

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experience should be understood. (Scherer et al. cite Robinson and Clore, 2002 to acknowledge a related criticism.) To view such reports as a snapshot of the outstanding emotional event in the 24-hour movie of yesterdays experience is problematic on numerous grounds. Who has the Cartier-Bresson-like skill to make such images? If the question provokes description of what comes to mind in the questionnaire-reading situation, why not respect the unique authenticity of that moment? I have often had the experience of sitting next to a dear companion who laughs loudly and repeatedly as a movie runs, only to learn when the lights come up that she regarded the lm as a thoroughly witless waste of time. Respondents understand that they are not on a therapy couch or babbling to themselves but are participating in a social-research project. Because we get to analyze only the questionnaires that are completed and returned, what we get are reports based on the honor attributed to the social-research operation. The respondents may take for granted that Scherer et al. could not be interested in their night dreams of passionate encounters, the moments of absurdist fantasies they form while observing others in supermarket lines, the angry tirades that are occasioned by a colleagues reference to the actions of a political leader. Issues of shame aside, much of emotional life will be neglected as respondents anticipate the sorts of things that respectable academics will not be interested in. The questionnaires request to identify an emotion implies that emotions are relative rare, as does the rst sentence of Scherer et al.s article: Imagine that fate has ordained you to experience an emotion today. Repeatedly, Scherer et al. urge that the low percentage of returned questionnaires be attributed to an absence of emotion on the prior day or a lack of sufciently strong emotional experience on the part of non-responders. Perhaps the opposite is true. If emotions are virtually constant in my experience, what I am likely to appreciate is that these researchers cannot be expecting me to report on much of my life. I may then toss the questionnaire aside, as obviously meant for people not like me. Or, if I respond, I must assume that these researchers cannot be expecting me to report on the powerful but morally trivial emotions that run through my dreams, the inconsequential delights and fears in my private reections on my public encounters, the ritual emotional displays I am always doing. In short I must assume the survey is not intended to occasion a review of the countless eventful points in the deep and

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constant sensual/aesthetic currents of my everyday life. For if I start that review, how could I stop to complete the questionnaire in practicable time? The event-sampling questionnaire effectively transfers the survey operation to the respondent, who is asked to survey the experience of the prior day and pick the best candidate for a representative emotion. As with survey questionnaires in general, much of the appeal of the method is as a kind of out-sourcing of research tasks to an unpaid workforce: researchers do not have to observe subjects throughout their day; they leave that work to the subjects, who report their ndings in neat, fungible forms. Out-sourcing is often an appealing way to hide disreputable industrial work. Here the quick and dirty judgments that must be made to pick a representative emotion from the prior day disappear from the purview of the research project. I should note that I use metaphors in this writing not to mock the researchers but to make a sociological point along the lines that Bruno Latour (1987) has developed. As a social institution, the social forms in which research is practiced are likely to make sense to researchers as efcient, logical, systematically disciplined, etc., much as these values make sense to people managing other important contemporary social institutions. It is important to note that such survey operations are themselves part of everyday social life for large parts of the population. At many dinner tables, household members use folk practices to select narratively worthy, emotionally compelling experiences from the days stock of events to tell and relive. In this respect Scherer et al.s methods are problematic precisely because they are not articial: they invite a reporting operation that is analogous to a naturally occurring, socially formed ritual practice. Put another way, their emotion-event survey yields a valuable form of data, one that captures part of the naturally occurring everyday life of subjects, but it is not the product envisioned by Scherer et al. The questionnaires list of 14 emotions conveys the researchers ontology of emotions, that emotions are such that they are graspable quickly and in standard language. Even the survey request to selfreport an emotion in ones own words conveys that presumptive ontology. Cased in the format of a social survey, emotions become things analogous to other things that are surveyed, like political opinions and consumer preferences. Just as elections and public opinion polls tend to reduce life to choices instantly made among

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limited alternatives, just as markets encourage people to narrow their wild desires and crystallize them into purchase transactions, so emotions become things that can be identied quickly and transformed into standardized conventions. Consider the pragmatics of answering an emotion survey, whether an event or time sample. While videotape and open-ended interviews facilitate revisits and multiple, collaborative revisions of efforts to get descriptions right, the practice of responding to event or experience sampling assumes a brief time in which to answer. If the accurate description of emotion requires poets to struggle endlessly to invent a form of expression that will not distort the thing expressed . . . well, that cant be the kind of emotion the surveyors expect a respondent to record. Ontological assumptions matter. Naturalistic methods for describing emotions seek to preserve their corporeal being as inevitably idiosyncratic phenomena. No two laughs are alike; the very point of laughter is, in effect, to live a moment both within and outside of a conventional form. What laughs (and tears and anger and shame) say is that something is being experienced that words cannot fully grasp. This is not a philosophical point, it is an empirical reality critical to the causal explanation of important patterns in social life. Thus the process through which rage rises and leads to murderous assaults has within it a process of struggling with the realization that language, even the most vicious curses, cannot capture and extinguish stinging humiliation (Katz, 1988: ch. 2). By overriding the personal distinctiveness of emotional experience, a research practice that invites standardized characterizations loses contact with the phenomenon it sets out to study. Survey methods, whether event or time focused, also presume a competency to ll out forms. We lose the emotional life of young children and some of the inrm. More subtly we also fail to reach vast areas of social life in which competing attentions overwhelm subjects competency to respond. Emotions experienced in highpressure situations, at work, when making love, while drinking and heavy partying, are likely to fall out of the picture. In presuming that their subjects lived a prior day in which it is sensible to believe that an emotion may not have occurred, and in which, if emotions had occurred, they could be recalled, are Scherer et al. relying on personality stereotypes about the German and French Swiss? Put another way, a promising use of emotion-event sampling is to discover its differential sensibility to different populations.

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2. Alfred Schutzs phenomenology is foundational to the sociological study of everyday life. Of particular value is his insistence that the analysts conceptions, theories and explanations are second-order phenomena which address the conceptions, theories and explanations that members of society constantly use to create social life. Applied to the study of emotions, this means that a persons production of an emotion is an act performed with sensitivity to its recognition in situational time and place. People routinely laugh, show deference through displays of shyness, and express righteous indignation with an eye to how others will conceptualize their behavior and use their characterization as a contingency for responsive action. My laugh will be received as proof I am with chuckling others in spirit; my display of shyness will sustain my prole as respectful; my angry gestures against the political leader will bond me to my like-minded colleagues. I can feign anger, hide my superiority behind humble displays, and, even when I dont get the joke, start and stop laughing with just the right timing. As a prospective respondent, I would not know if Scherer et al. want me to report on such emotions. It is not simply a matter of distinguishing supercial and authentic emotions; the dialectical ambiguity over just that issue is part and parcel of my intimate manner of participating in social life. Again we reach the ontology of emotions. I dont have emotions independent of my being a participant in social life. Now, creating the social conditions for shaping experience into collectively patterned emotions is not only a matter of quotidian interaction ritual; it is a huge industry that structures a vast part of everyday life. I refer not only to the funhouses that families visit on special vacation days but to the newspaper columns and cartoons, the TV and radio shows, even the political and sexual emails that increasingly form the landscape of our everyday lives. The ubiquitous exposure to stories packaged in the ancient categories tragedy and comedy is evidence that much of western culture routinely operates by structuring audience emotions. Do Scherer et al. expect me to report the tears that fell when Lassie came home on TV last night? Or should I take it for granted that they have in mind an emotional life that I experience somehow outside the culture that constantly surrounds me? And if my work is to work on emotions, what then? I refer here not only to therapists paid to empathize and lawyers paid as surrogate carriers of outrage, and not only to the happy disposition-displays

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required by the service work that sociologists have been studying for 25 years (Hochschild, 1979). Many occupations consist essentially of managing emotions: keeping a class of university students interested as opposed to bored, making suspects cry so that they will confess, keeping small children from crying so that a pre-school will not collapse into chaos. Historical changes have brought emotions to the core of occupational practices that were once relatively indifferent to emotions. Before student evaluations became a routine part of academic promotion reviews, the professor had less reason to care about student affections. When the police could beat confessions out of subjects, they needed posture neither as Mutt nor as Jeff. When fewer women worked out of the house, more children could be left to cry out their tears alone. Can we assume that the historical explosion of work on emotions has not affected the ongoing stream of the workers emotions? An appreciation of how far emotions have become part of the occupational order raises doubts about the project of asking a representative sample of the general population to identify an emotion from yesterdays experience. 3. From Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the sociological study of everyday life takes the understanding that emotions are metamorphoses, processes of emerging from and sinking back into relatively unreective ways of being in the world. (For two short works showing how this tradition can orient social research strategies, see Leder, 1990 and Ostrow, 1990.) This means that a rst-order requirement for studying emotions is that data be diachronic in form, or at least attentive to diachronic structure. The very essence of emotions as metamorphoses, that is as processes of changing the bodily form in which life is experienced, drops off the research agenda when data are snapshot and synchronic. It seems unlikely that any survey can train subjects to do more than give snapshot labels to their emotional experiences and the situations in which they arose. The emergence and desistance process is lost from surveys not only because most subjects wont perform reliably as poets but because the beginnings and endings of emotional experience are ontologically lost to self-reective subjects. That subjects will not be reliable guides to the phases of their emotional experiences does not mean that the temporal dimensions of emotional experience are outside the reach of social research. Videotape, participant observations and probing conversational inter-

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views can reveal much that will escape standardized self-reports. Conventional forms of academic psychological research can get at these metamorphoses as well, although ingenious creativity may be necessary. I think here of Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clores (1983) phone surveys, which showed subjects reporting different dispositions based on their local weather and also based on whether they rst were asked about their local weather. In a way that recalls Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, the very process of asking subjects to reect on their emotional life is likely to change the phenomena they remember. In studies of laughter, crying, shame and anger in everyday life, I have found something that is not unfamiliar in psychological research, although I use a vocabulary closer to the terms of peoples mundane experiences. What I nd is that these emotions emerge in response to a kind of fall from an unreective being-in-the-world (Katz, 1996). Indeed a literal, physical fall can lead as quickly and compellingly to shame, to crying, to laughter or, with the addition of a belief that one has been pushed, to anger. The process of constructing each of these emotions is radically different. The emotion path is usually taken with lightning speed. But the origin is the recurrent existential dilemma of having to make sense immediately of having been thrown out of a taken-for-granted, relatively unreective embrace by social life. I am thus encouraged that further development of the emotionevent survey may lead to knowledge about the kinds of people, the kinds of social engagements and the kinds of provocations that may guide people onto one or the other of these paths. But the pursuit of this knowledge is unlikely to take on speed without a prior appreciation of an irony in the ontology of emotions. In contrast to the common notion that emotions are opposed to reection, socially recognizable emotions, at least the four situationally erupting and declining emotions I have studied, routinely are movements from a relatively non-reective state of being merged with the immediate contextual grounds of behavior to a self-examining, self-probing effort to make sense of a break and to re-establish non-reective grounds for further action. In an effort to restore a condent grasp of what had been unreectively used as a secure base for the self, these emotions bring something out of the body shouts, laughs, tears, blushes and cringing mannerisms. These behavioral specics recognize that one has been at least momentarily thrown out of respectable communal clothing or that holding onto a

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sense of a naturally grounded being requires an immediate, extraordinary effort to locate and express a typically hidden part of ones corporeal being. 4. As I nd limitations in the methodology proposed by Scherer et al., I maintain a vivid awareness of the limits of my own studies and a more general awareness of the absurd logic of social science in general. Any form of research will have limits that can sensibly be taken as indicating that one should not go on with the endeavor. If a naturalistic study of emotions in everyday life cannot conceivably lead to knowledge about more than a statistically unrepresentative fragment of human experience, why bother? If laboratory and survey methods proceed on assumptions that betray the ontology of emotions, using them may ritually serve the gods of science, but at the cost of losing contact with the sacred target. It is diplomatic to plead universal limitations and to speak of multiple methods that triangulate or take cumulative, independent approaches to the phenomena we try to describe and explain. Somehow it seems compelling to believe that, by using a variety of research strategies, we learn more. This belief helps, even though it is based on the questionable mathematical methodo-logic of multiplying our limitations in order to diminish them. The nal point about emotions is that we do not have to come up with a rational answer to this dilemma: our emotions ensure that we will go on. As researchers working in different traditions, we respond differently to the shock of nding that others methods throw us out of taken-for-granted assumptions about our own research ways. Reading Scherer et al., I respond not with tears or shame but with what I hope is understood as some humor and, above all, with an increasingly erce conviction to continue naturalistic studies of everyday life. At the very least I now know I produce a basis for critiquing a signicant body of estimable work. I trust Scherer et al. will respond in kind, nding a new awareness of the limitations of naturalistic sociology to inspire their own further work. As each of us wonders how the other can go on, we all go on together, happily locked in the agonistic bonds of intellectual community.
Authors address: Department of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles, 264 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 951551, USA. [email: jackkatz@ soc.ucla.edu]

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References
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