What Emotions Bring to Managing, Caring for, and Sharing Qualitative Data

This paper presents the findings of a collaborative autoethnography designed to deeply explore the question of how qualitative researchers relate to and care for their data. Through our analysis, we find that the emotions we experience when working with data are integral to our (responsible) research practices. These often negative emotions are intertwined with three ways in which care is involved in our data practices: i) our care for data as a means of caring for research participants; ii) our care for data maintenance and infrastructure; and iii) our care for the quality and usefulness of data themselves. As we care for data, our sense of ourselves as scholars ‘co-becomes’ along with them, which strengthens the attachments we have to data. The emotions and caring relations which we identify are often in tension with common expectations for data sharing. We therefore conclude by reflecting on the implications of our findings for how data management and sharing might be carried out in ways that acknowledge the affective nature of research data practices.