Enquêter sur l’amour auprès de trois générations

retour sur le rôle central des émotions dans le processus de recherche qualitative

Abstract

This article returns to the subjective dimensions of research experience by social science students investigating the love life of men and women aged between 23 to 88. It explains how and why emotions aroused by interactions between subjects and investigators have acquired the status of investigation tools and have proved to be central competencies within the research process. Mobilising, identifying and explaining these emotions thus made it possible to gain insight into the historical and social conditions relating to the possibility and impossibility of expressing love. Integrating emotions within the research process leads to an epistemological reorientation: more than the data that are collected, it is now the research experience that becomes the material on which the production of knowledge takes root.