The communication of the invisible - The grounded theory and autobiographic interviews as a way for exploring the field of emotions

In this paper we will discuss the methodological approach that we have used in our research on love relationships, emotions and new technologies of communication. Thus we will elaborate upon the  Grounded Theory as our main methodological approach for exploring the field of emotions. As already Strauss and Corbin claimed when they developed the Grounded Theory, this methodology is especially useful in those cases when we know nothing or very little about the field we are doing research upon, when there are neither categories nor a lot of useful data from earlier researches we can rely on.

Furthermore we will explain and argue why we opted for collecting autobiographical narrative interviews, and will show the ways in which we analysed them in order to research the emotions narrated and expressed in them. As we will show, autobiographic interviews offer the opportunity to gather information  about the social and individual life-story contexts (which are necessary for understanding where certain emotions or feelings biographically come from and how the have been webbed and traced). The thick descriptions, resulting from these narrative interviews, offer the possibility to enter into the subtexts, hidden beyond that which interviewees produce as their main narrative. It is at the moments in which they speak without reflecting upon everything they are saying (and about that which we, as researchers and interviewers, might expect from them) that emotions can be better grasped. An additional analysis of body movements and gestures recorded in field diaries has proved to be be crucial for our analyses.