Unpacking the Layers of Emotions: Methodological Challenges and Insights in Deliberate Research on Poverty

Ongoing scholarly debates on the study of emotions in political science often centre on the challenge of identifying and labelling emotions within specific research contexts and datasets. The underlying goal is to enhance conceptual clarity and ensure a shared understanding of phenomena as complex as emotions. This paper does not attempt to resolve the issue of emotions' identification and naming. Instead, it aims to broaden and clarify the epistemological challenges inherent in studying emotions by focusing on the structures and relations in which emotions arise within research contexts and datasets. This approach, while indirect, offers a productive way to address some of the methodological issues prevalent in political science and deliberative research. To illustrate this argument, I draw on examples from my ongoing research on poverty delineation, conducted during fieldwork (10–12/2024). In this project, we employ deliberative focus groups with individuals who, based on large-scale datasets, are likely to have lived experiences of poverty or vulnerability to it (e.g., senior women living alone, low-wage workers, and members of the Roma community). The focus groups explore participants’ lived experiences of poverty and their strategies for pursuing a good life under constrained conditions. Using various participatory methods, such as visual stimuli, creative techniques, and participant-led discussions, we aim to elicit a nuanced understanding of their experiences. Although still in the data collection phase, preliminary insights underscore the importance of considering the embeddedness of emotions within the research situation and its multiple "layers." The emotions expressed are diverse and often contradictory, making their simple identification and categorization insufficient. However, by analysing the structural and relational layers of the situation, we can better comprehend the dynamics at play and offer richer interpretations—without overemphasizing the precise labelling of individual emotions. This paper is structured in two parts. The first section discusses methodological approaches to studying emotions, combining theoretical perspectives with a review of relevant literature. The second section presents the case study, illustrating how attention to situational, structural, and relational characteristics of emotions can yield novel insights. While acknowledging the specificity of deliberative settings, I argue that this approach can reveal generalizable patterns relevant to other research contexts involving the study of emotions.