Sensing a Nursing Home. Reflections on Emotions in a Muti-Sited Ethnographic Study of Long-Term Care Facilities

The ethnographic immersion in a long-term care facility for older people encompasses participating in an emotional and bodily experience through all senses: the sight of aged and impaired bodies, the hearing of voices, cries, recognizable smell. Considering that emotions are a constitutive element of the reflexive process and its feeding, in this contribution we reflect on how this “sensing” and the associated emotions condition our work as ethnographers in the way we construct and analyze our data.

We adopt an emotional reflexivity approach (Holmes 2010, 2015; Burkitt 2012) to analyze the embodied and relational process through which social actors become aware of their emotions and make them an integral part of their own reflective processes. The underlying assumption is that all emotions are relational phenomena generated in the exchange and interactions in which we researchers are involved (Denzin 1984). We assume that the relational aspect is also decisive in the analysis and interpretation of the data, since the memory of the emotions felt during interviews or participant observation will inform the process of data analysis.

The reflection we propose based on these premises draws, first, on the experience of the author with immersion in similar observational fields and on the exchange and discussion of the relative fieldnotes. In addition, I shared and discussed results with a team of researchers engaged in a cross-national multi-sited ethnographic project.

We find that acknowledging and widening emotional repertoires is essential not only to enlarge the scenarios and possible interpretive frames in attempts to understand the complexity of the social (Sclavi 2003), but also to identify new methodological and epistemological frameworks.