I did interviews for my ethnography on sibling relationships and was really surprised at the amount of emotion that my questions stirred. Without trying, I am afraid I opened up painful memories for the subjects. I suppose this is a common side effect of studying people’s lives. And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to cause people emotional pain. Something I expected to be simply interesting turned into much more. It left a heavy, uncomfortable feeling in the air that I don’t like. I wonder how people who do this as a career deal with the effect they have on the subjects of the study.
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