Feeling the Way: Qualitative Clinical Research and the Affective Turn

Abstract

Qualitative clinical research is valued because of its ability to engage with meaning and experience. The affective, “feelingful” aspects of meaning and experience are important in clinical work and are at the core of the emergent “affective turn” in social science, but their investigation using language-based qualitative methods is troubled by issues of ineffability, interpretation and the contingent relations between talk and experience. Qualitative research using visual methods, physiological measures and mixed with quantitative research may begin to address these problems.