Empathy

Research with human subjects can often involve conflicting emotional responses on the part of the person conducting research. The researcher, for example, may feel a sense of aversion to what she or he sees and hears. More commonly, however, the researcher may develop a sense of empathy with the research participants that involves feelings of identification with participants' life problems. When research techniques such as participant observation and other similar qualitative methods are employed, the researcher often attempts to see the world from the participants' perspective and tries to develop an ability to take the role of the “other.” Such empathetic role-taking between humans suggests that most people have a desire to understand what life is like for those who are different from themselves. Qualitative researchers who employ such methodologies involving interviewing, observation, and ethnography do so to better understand how participants interpret and give meaning to their own experiences. Developing empathy for the social and [Page 253]personal lives of research participants facilitates a deeper understanding of social life in general.

One of the possible difficulties of developing empathy with the subjects of qualitative research is that one's objectivity may diminish. Rapport with research participants helps to understand their attitudes, feelings, and lived experiences, but it also may lead to overidentification. In anthropology, for example, some researchers have crossed the line of objectivity to the extent that they have chosen to live permanently in their research settings and not return to academic life. Under these sorts of circumstances, the scientific value of their ethnographic research could be lost altogether, especially if they chose not to publish the results of their study. In sum, developing rapport and showing empathy for the subjects of research, usually called “informants” in anthropology, can lead to useful insights into the lived experiences of local peoples, but it can also lead to a diminished objective viewpoint that may hinder placing the results of one's research in a wider context. In fieldwork settings that can be far removed from universities and other centers of scholarly activity, and may involve long periods of isolation for the social scientist, it is important to remember the initial goals and reasons underlying one's research activity so as to maintain a proper perspective.