Feeling your way: Exploring emotional reflexivity in joint interviews with couples in distance relationships

A robust sociology of emotions needs to include consideration of emotions not just as a topic of research but as something done within interactions with research participants, and perhaps especially within joint interviews. This chapter considers emotionality, or ways of being emotional within couples in distance relationships. It focuses particularly on how best to examine emotional reflexivity using in-depth joint interviews. The quality of data obtained from interviews depends not just on relations between researcher and participants, but on the emotionally reflexive relations participants have with absent others such as family and friends. By looking at data from across the joint interviews and then concentrating on one solo interview as a case study, it is possible to compare joint and single interviews as tools for studying emotional reflexivity in ways that capture its richness and ambivalence.