Researching Emotional Experiences as Discursive Elements – A Suggested Qualitative Method

Abstract

As scholars in the fields of political science, media research, and social psychology endeavor to understand crucial aspects of emotionality in the media, there is a growing need to methodologically address the communicative and discursive aspects of affective constructions in media texts. This article argues that by breaking down mediated emotional experiences represented through language in a set of identifiable elements, such as subject, emotion type, valence, intensity, proposed action, and object, those experiences could be used as workable and potent units of analysis when studying discursive and ideological media constructs of emotionality. By connecting insights from emotion science, the sociology of emotions, and media sociology, the qualitative method outlined, Emotional Experience Profiling (EEP), provides a flexible research tool conducive to an understanding of how emotional experiences represented through language in media texts are constructed and how they shape political discourse, identity, and emotional cultures. To demonstrate and illustrate the application of the method, the article provides examples from a pilot study which explores the research question: How do emotional experiences featured in Swedish far-right alternative news media construct and articulate political discourse?