katz ordinary lives extraordinary methods

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DOI: 10.1177/05390184040477072004; 43; 609Social Science Information

Jack KatzEveryday lives and extraordinary research methods

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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 researchEveryday lives and extraordinary researchmethodsmethods

It is understandable that a survey questionnaire could seem topsychologists to be a device to study emotions in everyday life.

Surveys take psychological research out of the artificial 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 fre-

quency (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 find 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

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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 phenom-ena occur in their social context; (2) interactionally, as behavior is

shaped by taking into account the response of others, whether co-

present 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 sub-

jects awareness. Data-gathering and recording techniques can

vary. In this tradition I have pursued a range of studies of emotionsin everyday life (Katz, 1999), including:

interviews, conducted by undergraduate students in a conver-

sational 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 atan 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 filming, 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 holidayshows, 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 briefly 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-

610 Social Science Information Vol 43 no 4



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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 groupsare appreciated, but as representatives of rival explanations that

are negated. My data-gathering strategies are biased toward describ-

ing 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, field obser-

vations and even videotape will miss many of the finely shadededges in which emotions emerge and fade away in the course of

personal experience, as well as countless dimensions of the auto-

biographical 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 flexible, social-psychological research always func-

tions 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 find four.

1. First, if the stain of artifice motivates the move out of the

laboratory, questionnaire surveys of everyday life are not a cleansolution. For one thing, respondents, in filling out a questionnaire

about yesterdays emotions, are inevitably aware that they are creat-

ing 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 dis-

play an attractive capacity for self-criticism. For others a gay profile

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

Katz Trends and developments 611



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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 problematicon 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 film 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 supermarketlines, 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 first sentence of Scherer et al.s

article: Imagine that fate has ordained you to experience an emo-

tion today. Repeatedly, Scherer et al. urge that the low percentageof returned questionnaires be attributed to an absence of emotion on

the prior day or a lack of sufficiently 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

reflections 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 surveyoperation 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 findings in neat, fungible forms. Out-sourcing is often

an appealing way to hide disreputable industrial work. Here thequick and dirty judgments that must be made to pick a representa-

tive 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 efficient, logical, systematically disciplined, etc.,much as these values make sense to people managing other impor-

tant 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 notartificial: 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 self-

report 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 identified quickly and trans-

formed 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 experi-

ence 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 surveyorsexpect a respondent to record.

Ontological assumptions matter. Naturalistic methods for des-

cribing 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 realitycritical 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 fill out forms. We lose the emotional life of young

children and some of the infirm. More subtly we also fail to reach

vast areas of social life in which competing attentions overwhelm

subjects competency to respond. Emotions experienced in high-

pressure 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 socio-

logical 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, theoriesand 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 sensi-

tivity to its recognition in situational time and place.

People routinely laugh, show deference through displays of shy-

ness, 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 asproof I am with chuckling others in spirit; my display of shyness

will sustain my profile 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 superficial and authentic emotions; thedialectical 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 familiesvisit 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 cate-

gories 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 out-

side 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 occu-

pational practices that were once relatively indifferent to emotions.

Before student evaluations became a routine part of academic pro-

motion 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 fewerwomen 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 pro-

ject 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 meta-

morphoses, processes of emerging from and sinking back into rela-

tively unreflective 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 first-order

requirement for studying emotions is that data be diachronic in

form, or at least attentive to diachronic structure. The very essenceof 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 pro-

cess is lost from surveys not only because most subjects wont per-

form reliably as poets but because the beginnings and endings of

emotional experience are ontologically lost to self-reflective subjects.

That subjects will not be reliable guides to the phases of their emo-

tional experiences does not mean that the temporal dimensions of

emotional experience are outside the reach of social research. Video-

tape, 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 dis-

positions based on their local weather and also based on whether

they first were asked about their local weather. In a way that recalls

Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, the very process of asking

subjects to reflect 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 psychologicalresearch, although I use a vocabulary closer to the terms of peoples

mundane experiences. What I find is that these emotions emerge in

response to a kind of fall from an unreflective 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 con-

structing each of these emotions is radically different. The emotion

path is usually taken with lightning speed. But the origin is the recur-rent existential dilemma of having to make sense immediately of

having been thrown out of a taken-for-granted, relatively unreflec-

tive embrace by social life.

I am thus encouraged that further development of the emotion-

event 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 withouta prior appreciation of an irony in the ontology of emotions. In con-

trast to the common notion that emotions are opposed to reflection,

socially recognizable emotions, at least the four situationally erupt-

ing and declining emotions I have studied, routinely are movements

from a relatively non-reflective 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-reflective grounds for further action. In an effort to restore a

confident grasp of what had been unreflectively 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 specifics 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, extra-

ordinary effort to locate and express a typically hidden part of

ones corporeal being.

4. As I find 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 con-

ceivably lead to knowledge about more than a statistically unrepre-

sentative fragment of human experience, why bother? If laboratoryand survey methods proceed on assumptions that betray the ontol-

ogy 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. Some-

how it seems compelling to believe that, by using a variety of

research strategies, we learn more. This belief helps, even though itis based on the questionable mathematical methodo-logic of multi-

plying our limitations in order to diminish them.

The final 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 finding 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 orshame but with what I hope is understood as some humor and,

above all, with an increasingly fierce conviction to continue natura-

listic studies of everyday life. At the very least I now know I produce

a basis for critiquing a significant body of estimable work. I trust

Scherer et al. will respond in kind, finding 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

Hochschild, A. R. (1979) Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,

American Journal of Sociology 83: 55175.Katz, J. (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New

York: Basic Books.

Katz, J. (1996) The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve, Theory and Society 25:

54582.

Katz, J. (1999) How Emotions Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through

Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leder, D. (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Ostrow, J. M. (1990) Social Sensitivity: A Study of Habit and Experience. Albany:

State University of New York Press.Reis, H. T. and Gable, S.L. (2000) Event Sampling and Other Methods for Studying

Daily Experience, in H. T. Reis and C. M. Judd (eds) Handbook of Research

Methods in Social and Personality Psychology, pp. 190222. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Robinson, M. D. and Clore, G. L. (2002) Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Acces-

sibility Model of Emotional Self-Report, Psychological Bulletin 128(6): 93460.

Schwarz, N. and Clore, G. L. (1983) Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of

Well-Being: Informative and Directive Functions of Affective States, Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology 45: 51323.



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